STATE governors’ misappropriation of local government funds, as recently alleged by President Muhammadu Buhari, will not stop with a sheer Executive Order from the President, but by proper constitutional amendment, analysts say.
President Buhari had in May 2020 signed an Executive Order to grant financial autonomy to the judiciary, legislature, and local government councils.
Delivering a speech at an event hosted for members of the Senior Executive Course 44 (2022) of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) at the Presidential Villa, Abuja, the President came hard on governors over what he alleged was their maladministration of resources at the local government level.
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Buhari attributed the stunted development at the third tier of government to the governors’ questionable actions on LGA funds.
Besides Buhari’s remarks, the Minister of Budget and National Planning, Clement Agba, had said at the end of the last Federal Executive Council meeting that the high poverty rate in the country was due to the governors’ inability to complement the efforts of the Federal government in its fight against poverty.
Agba had alleged that governors had abandoned 72 per cent of the nation’s poor residing in rural communities, while expending state resources on the capital cities.
Informed analysts, reacting to the development, described the blame trading by the Federal and state governments as “political rhetorics”, which they said can only be solved with proper devolution of powers, and stopping the idea of joint accounts by state and local governments.
“There is need for proper devolution of powers through constitutional amendment to free the state assemblies and the local governments. Until you do this, true democracy cannot be practised in the states,” a public affairs analyst and development expert, Law Mefor, said today in Abuja.
Mefor stressed that state governors had become “emperors” at the sub-national level, controlling the state and local government structure to the detriment of real democracy.
“Take the case of Governor Wike for instance, the money he’s throwing around everywhere he goes, was it appropriated by the state Assembly? It is not. Such funds are supposed to be appropriated by the State Assembly, going by the details of the 1999 constitution,” he said.
He argued that if the President really wanted to rescue the situation, he has to propose an Executive bill that would abrogate the 1999 constitution, which allows joint accounts for state and local government funds.
Mefor said, “The President is waking up too late in the day, as far as I’m concerned. He has up to six months to submit an Executive bill. Let it be one of the legacies he is leaving behind to lessen the Nigerian masses’ sufferings.”
Also, the Lead Director, Centre for Social Justice, Eze Onyekpere, said that the Federal and state governments were frittering away huge amounts of money, and urged them to “stop trading blame and do the right thing.”
According to Onyekpere, a lawyer and specialist in development economics, the critical challenge was at the state level, where he said the governors were like emperors.
He said, “As a leader of the party, especially now that we are in the political season, you must be in the governors’ good books. If you are not, you may not be returned to your post. He selects the principal officers and other officers at the state Assembly. If you fall out of line, your colleagues will impeach you.
“We may be deceiving ourselves, if we claim that what we have at the sub-national is real democracy.”
An economist and public affairs analyst, Kelvin Emmanuel, told The ICIR that the Nigerian governance structure both at the Federal and sub-national structure was not living up to expectation.
“When the governors know that constitutionally they are entitled to these funds, they do whatever they like with the money. They are not properly checked by the state Assembly because the governor is the leader of the party in the state and controls the party structure,” Emmanuel said.
He agreed with the power devolution idea, saying it would make many states become competitive and lessen what he called the “feeding bottle federalism” being enjoyed by some states.
Harrison Edeh is a journalist with the International Centre for Investigative Reporting, always determined to drive advocacy for good governance through holding public officials and businesses accountable.