PEOPLE AND POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNA  

In Defence of the Local Government Reform Committee

kudugana@yahoo.com

Four months ago when President Olusegun Obasanjo raised a panel under the late Etsu Nupe, Alhaji Umaru Sanda Ndayako, to reform the country’s corrupt and profligate local governments, there were widespread apprehensions about his motives. The apprehensions were understandable. First, the president’s refusal in late 1991 to release money in time for the Independent National Electoral Commission to prepare a voter’s register against the last general elections, not to mention the conspiracy between the presidency and the PDP controlled National Assembly to extend the tenure of the local government beyond the constitutionally stipulated 3 years, had made it impossible to conduct the local government elections scheduled for early 2002. These elections are still to be conducted.

 Second, the president had made it abundantly clear on not a few occasions that he preferred a selected local government system to an elected one. Third, his choice of a traditional ruler, albeit a highly respected one, to head the panel, was bound to raise political eyebrows. This was because traditional rulers had been—and still are-- patently unhappy with their alienation – as opposed to their insulation – from  politics by the 1999 Constitution which rejected any rote for them in the system.

As we all know, Alhaji Umaru Sanda Ndayako sadly passed away before his panel could finalize and submit its report. He was replaced immediately by the equally respected Malam Liman Ciroma who once served as the Secretary to the Federal Military Government under General Obasanjo. The panel has since submitted its report, and predictably, it has generated criticisms.

Media reports of the submission of the report to President Obasanjo, suggest that the panel’s most important recommendations are (1) the purported replacement of our presidential model of democracy by the parliamentary model at the grassroots, (2) the retention of the current number of local government, i.e. 774 and (3) the scrapping of the present joint account between the state and the local governments.

In so far as the details of the panel’s report are very sketchy, it is premature to pass any definitive judgment on its recommendations. This, however, has apparently not deterred those who still suspect President Obasanjo’s motive from rejecting some, if not all, of the panel’s recommendations. One such rejectionist is Chief Bola Tinubu, the governor of Lagos State. Another is Mr. Wole Olanipekun, the president of the Nigerian Bar Association. Yet another is the coalition of the opposition parties led by the All Nigeria Peoples’ Party, which sees the reform as a cover for manipulating the country’s into a one-party dictatorship.

Governor Tinubu has been reported as describing the panel’s purported recommendation of a return from the presidential to parliamentary model at the local government level as a “water and oil situation”. The two, he says, obviously do not mix. “You are operating a presidential system at the national level and parliamentary at the local level, it cannot work”, he told a recent joint press conference with visiting governor of Kano State, Alhaji Ibrahim Shekarau.

Not only do water and oil not mix, says Tinubu, he was reportedly apprehensive of the panel’s purported suggestion that traditional rulers should be allowed to play a partisan role in the new local government system.

Until the government publishes the panel’s report – which it should as quickly as possible to facilitate sensible debate on the reform – one cannot be certain that the criticisms of the panel are not based on a misunderstanding of the panel’s report. 

What one can say for sure is that the rejection of the report based on suspicions of the motive of the person who set it up, rather than on the merit of the content of the report itself, is untenable. And this, to me, seems to be the case with the panel’s rejection by the president of the NBA and the coalition of opposition parties.

Rejection based on motive is untenable because the outcome of a panel’s work can be at variance with the motives of the panel’s initiator. This appears to be the case with the LG reform panel if only because its most important outcome, as far as   Iam concerned, is its insistence that local governments must be elective rather than selective.

This, of course, is not to say that elections cannot be manipulated or rigged. As Nigerians are more than painfully aware from their experience since 1963, elections in poor and largely illiterate societies are hardly the most difficult things to manipulate or rig. Nigerians are also painfully aware that rigged elections can be worse than no elections at all as they have seen from the last one. As a rule, however, elections do provide the choice that, by definition, is absent from dictatorships. This is a crucial distinction; whereas elections contain the seeds of hope, dictatorships create despondency.

All of which leaves us with Governor Tinubu’s more specific rejection of the panel’s report. At first glance the governor’s argument that the panel’s apparent hybrid of two models is a recipe for chaos, sounds valid. This position, however, does not stand up to a closer inspection. This is simply because the panel’s recommendation is consistent with the Local Government Decrees 1998, the enabling law for the current constitution.

The Local Government Decree, 1998 in section 1 (7) says the Chairman of a Local Government is its chief executive at the same time that he also presides over the meetings of the Local Government Council which has the power to make bye-laws. This is clearly different from the constitutional provisions for the state and federal levels of government where the chief executives – governors in the case of state and the president for the federation – are not members of their respective legislative arms, much less preside over them.

In other words, the LG panel’s recommendation on the LG system is merely a continuation of the status quo, which in turn, is not inconsistent with the constitution.. The perception that the panel is inconsistent merely arises from the assumption that local governments are as autonomous from State Governments as State Governments are from  the Federal Government.

This assumption is as wrong as it is widespread. The constitutional procedures for creating States and Local Governments and for adjusting their boundaries may be the same, but there is the crucial distinction that Local Governments do not have judicial arms separate from that of their various states. Too, Local Government Councils, unlike State Government, can only make bye-laws.

Not only is the Local Government reform panel’s recommendation of a so-called parliamentary model the continuation of the status quo, it is paradoxical that those who reject it also complain about the presidential model being inevitably too expensive. I have my doubts about such claims, but this is another matter for another day. For now, one can safely say that it is inconsistent  for  someone to say the presidential model is too expensive but at the same time reject an alternative which one thinks is cheaper.

All in all, the fuss surrounding the report of the Local Government reform panel is unnecessary, even premature, considering the fact that not much is known of the important details of the report. From the little that is known there seems to be a general acceptance of the present number of local government in contrast to, say, criticisms of the   apparent change to the so-called parliamentary model. But if there should be any fuss at all it should be about this number, which is certainly untenable. Back in 1976, the first time the Federal Government dabbled into Local Government reform which, as it should be, had been the prerogative of regional and then state governments, we had 301 local governments. It seems to have grown exponentially since then – 450 in 1988, 587 in 1991 and 774 in 1992, and still counting going by the increasing demand for them. Most of these local governments were arbitrary creations. Their number ought, therefore, to have been of the greatest concern to critics of the Local Government reform panel.

To be sure the  motive of the president is important just as it is important that we have the appropriate mode for our democracy. But then models essentially are like tools; they are effective only in a deft hand and ineffective in a lousy hand. As for president’s motive, the proper anti-dote  is to be vigilant about the content of the panel’s report, and more importantly, to be even more vigilant about its implementation. The kind of knee-jerk rejection of the L G reform panel which has been prevalent since it submitted its report to the president about a couple of weeks ago is hardly helpful of the reform that is certainly needed to clean up our messy local government system.