PEOPLE & POLITICS

Memo to the Chairman, Local Government Reform Panel

By

Mohammed Haruna

kudugana@yahoo.com

 

 

Your Highness, The Estu Nupe,

Alhaji Umaru Sanda Ndayako (CFR).

Baa gan dozhi !

Sir, you must look this gift horse in the mouth

I should begin this memo by congratulating you on your appointment as the chairman of the 11-man Technical Committee on the Review of the Structure of Local Government Councils in Nigeria. As a Nupe, I should feel proud that my paramount traditional ruler is being pressed into the high national service of charting the way into reforming the tier of government which, in theory, is closest to the people, but which, in practice, has turned out in the last four years to be as remote, if not more so, than the state and federal governments.

I do not believe President Obasanjo who has pressed you into this new national service – you’ve performed such yeoman service before, most notably as chairman of the panel for the reform of university education – is justified to pontificate about the moral decay of the local government system, seeing how the federal government has been no more transparent and efficient than the local governments. Indeed, there are many Nigerians, including myself, who have reason to believe that, inspite of the crudity of the corruption and the blatant inefficiency of the lowest tier of government, the state and federal governments are worse culprits, if only because, as an African proverb goes, the rot in a fish starts from the head.

However, much as one does not think the president – and the governors – have the moral right to point fingers at the local governments for their corrupt and inefficient ways, it is difficult not to share his outrage at the mess in those governments. To that extent, no one can quarrel with the president about the need to clean up the mess at that level – as indeed at the other levels.

For you to have been singled out, of all the eminent Nigerians, to head the team that should provide the blueprint for cleaning up the mess, is obviously a sign of the confidence those in authority have in your capabilities and integrity. Your choice is therefore something for which you should be congratulated.

However, I am somewhat reluctant to congratulate you for the simple reason that I am skeptical about the motive of those who have pressed you into this new national service. I fear that what looks like a gift horse to take you into even greater national renown, may indeed be a Trojan horse to further divide and rule this nation in general, and the region you come from – the North – in particular. In other words, there is a need for you to look this gift horse in the mouth to avoid the danger of riding it into committing iniquity against the nation and against your own people. This is because the president’s idea of reform, which essentially is an appointed rather than an elected local government, is the most retrogressive idea one can think of.

Your Highness, I say this without prejudice to the need for reform of the system of governance of Nigeria at all levels. This need is obvious from the fact that corruption and inefficiency at all levels of governance is now a notorious fact. Second, the recent competition among governors to create new local governments was unhealthy for both our economics and politics, in the light of the lean resources available for development and it is, therefore, only right to stop them. Indeed, the existing 774 (?) local governments already overburden the tax payer. Many, if not most of those that were created between 1986 and 1996 hardly met most of the sensible and rational criteria enunciated by the 1976 Dasuki panel on local government reform.

Third, there is the not-so-minor matter of confusion over the very number of the local governments. The official figure is 774, which was the figure the president mentioned in his note to the Council of State that met to discuss the issue, among others, recently. However, the Local Government (Basic Constitutional and Transitional Provisions) Decree 1998, speaks in Sections 2(1) and (2) of 770 local governments and the six area councils of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, making a total of 776.This tallies with the actual figure in Schedule 1 of the 1999 constitution.

However, whereas the 1998 decree talks about 776 local governments and area councils, when you add up, as I have, the figures of the local governments written in Column six of Schedule 1 of the decree, you get 763 local governments excluding the six FCT area councils making a total of 769. The difference between the figures mentioned in Section 2, Subsections (1) and (2), of the 1998 decree, i.e. 776, and the figure you get from an actual count of the listed names of the local governments and area councils, i.e. 769, is somewhat explained by the fact that whereas column six of the Schedule 1 of the decree says Jigawa has 21 local governments, an actual count gives you 28.

Clearly, there is a little confusion over the number of local governments and area councils in the country. Is the number 769, 774 or 776? This may look like mere hair-splitting, but it is more serious than that when you consider the fact that each local government, on average, collected more statutory allocations from the federation account than most state governments used to collect in the seventies and eighties.

With this confusion over the number of local governments, coupled with the high degree of arbitrariness in their creation, and, needless to say, their legendary corruption and inefficiency, no one can deny the need to reform the local government system. No one, I am also sure, can deny your capacity to do the job, along with members of your panel, all of whom have excellent track records of public service.

Even then, Your Highness, I maintain that you should still look this gift horse from the presidency in the mouth inspite of the saying that one should never look a gift horse in the mouth. I urge you to ignore this saying because chances are that although it looks like a gift horse, it may, as I have said, indeed be a Trojan horse. I have at least three good reasons for my skepticism about the genuineness of the gift.

First, at a personal level, the gift has come from someone who has the reputation of having the memory of an elephant – that is, he does not forgive easily and certainly never forgets a slight, no matter how small. I have it on excellent authority that you have slighted the president on more than one occasion in the last two years. You yourself may have seen the incidents as the case of a good old friend offering honest advice to his president who appears to be heading in the wrong direction, but the truth is always bitter and most leaders, most of all Obasanjo possibly, do not like being told the truth, especially when it is unvarnished the way I heard you told him, first, when you had a private audience with him over the National Identity Card crisis and, second, when you led a team that met with him in an effort to douse the crisis of the flawed recent general elections.

Your choice by Mr. President to head the Local Government reform panel is ostensibly to give you yet one more opportunity to serve your country and your people, but it could also very well be an opportunity for him to get even with you for telling him off on at least the two occasions I have mentioned. If this sounds far-fetched consider the manner of the appointment of your panel as well as its terms of reference. These constitute the second reason for my skepticism.

Your Highness, it should be obvious to anyone who compares the note he had intended to submit to the last meeting of the Council of State titled Local Government Administration in Nigeria and the one he eventually submitted titled Brief on the Review of the Structure of Governance in Nigeria, that your panel was an afterthought. Whereas the first note restricted itself to local government reform, the second note went well beyond it. Sir, if you look at paragraphs 13, 14 and 15 (v) of the second note, it will show you why your panel was an afterthought and perhaps a poor substitute for the National Conference, sovereign or otherwise, which the president has always consistently resisted but which the South, his Yoruba kith and kin in particular, have always insisted upon.

Paragraph 13 of that note talked about setting up, not a Technical Committee, but an Advisory Committee to review, not just the existing local government system, but the entire structure of governance in Nigeria. Paragraph 14 talked about its composition – 243 members in all as against 11 of you – including its chairman, deputy chairman and secretary to be appointed by the president. It is, however, paragraph 15(v) that betrays the hidden agenda in the proposals because, through an apparent slip of the pen, it talked about the Advisory Committee providing “draft amendment to the relevant sections of the Constitution in accordance with these recommendations of the Conference”.(emphasis mine). It would seem then that the Advisory Committee was meant, in all but name, to be the National Conference.

It is not clear, at least to me, why the president chose to substitute even the Advisory Committee with your Technical Committee, but as you can see from your terms of reference there is little difference between the two. Although by the title of your committee you are supposed to concern yourself only with working out a blueprint for cleaning up the mess in the local government system, three of your four terms of reference go well beyond reforming the local governments, and includes dividing Nigeria, somewhat surreptitiously, into six regions. Your Highness, does it not puzzle you why the president would want your 11-man team to do the work of 243 men, except of course, if the president is under some not-so-puzzling pressure by advocates of Sovereign National Conference to muzzle through their agenda past Nigerians before the political bubble created by the very shoddy handling of the last general elections goes bust?

Which takes me to my third reason for saying you really must look the president’s gift horse in the mouth. Your Highness, you will no doubt recall that during his last days as Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar met and briefed key sections of the Nigerian society, including traditional rulers, on the state of the nation. You will recall, sir, that he met with traditional rulers on May 21, 1999. You will, I am sure, remember that, speaking on behalf of the traditional rulers from all over Nigeria, you protested most vehemently and eloquently about your exclusion from the 1999 Constitution by Abubakar’s government. Not only were traditional rulers excluded from being represented in the National Council of State, Abubakar’s government also removed the creation of State Councils of Chiefs from the Constitution.

Needless to say Abubakar’s action angered you and your colleagues and you have collectively and singly used every opportunity since then to get redress. President Obasanjo’s idea of an appointed local government with traditional rulers once more playing a key role in local affairs seems to be the opportunity of a life-time for traditional rulers to get the best redress possible.

I have no doubt that Abubakar was wrong to remove the traditional rulers from the Constitution and as such you are right to seek redress. Even then you must grab the opportunity offered by Obasanjo with the greatest caution. An appointed local government in the 21st century is clearly a retrogression which you must never endorse if you want to retain the respect of Nigerians who naturally want to have a say in how their affairs are managed.

By all means, Your Highness, accept the president’s gift horse but you should by no means climb on it before you’ve looked it thoroughly in the mouth.