Any Use For Local Government?

Those who came up with the idea of three tiers of government must have thought of the convenience in the administration of government. Just as the separation of powers among the three arms of government – the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, serves as a check on the abuse of power, the three tiers of government –   the federal, state and local governments must have been conceived to pave way for easy and convenient administration.

In particular, the creation of local government is, by all intents and purposes, to bring government and development nearer to the people at the grassroots. Regrettably however, this objective, worthwhile as it is, appears to have suffered setback in recent times. Unlike in the past when local government areas were a beehive of development projects, the modern day local government councils add little or no value to the lives of the grassroot people.

Before now, local government used to be the center of attraction. Due to its viability and effectiveness in terms of developmental projects, the grassroots people hardly depended on the state government for anything. Those were the era when those who presided over the affairs of the local government were men and women with conscience who were always conscious of the needs and plights of their people.

With little resources at their disposal, the olden days local government councils were able to embark on meaningful projects that touched positively on the lives of the citizenry. Apart from electricity which used to be the sole responsibility of the state and federal governments, virtually all other developmental projects such as roads, boreholes for potable water, provision of fertilizers for farmers at highly subsidised rate, local health care delivery, among others, were always provided by the local government councils.

Today’s third tier of government appears to be a drainpipe. In spite of high allocations that trickle down to them on monthly basis, those at the helm of affairs of the local government councils could hardly point at reasonable developmental projects as their stewardship. Yet, the local government areas are seriously crying for attention and development.

With poverty biting the people very hard, and the social infrastructures at their epileptic state, and in some areas almost non-existent, some of the youths in the rural areas could not resist the temptation of constituting themselves into security threats to government and the companies operating in their areas. The Niger Delta states are the worst hit.

Get me right, the poor performance recorded by successive administrations at the local government level  is not limited to a particular region. It cuts across the nation. Even in some states, local government chairmen connive with the state governors, to enrich themselves and to line up the pockets of their political godfathers and supporters, using white elephant projects as a cover-up.

It is in view of this that many Nigerians have written off the local governments in Nigeria as a useless, worthless tier of government that has no positive bearing on the lives of the citizenry.

And if truly the local government, as provided for in the Nigerian Constitution, was created to address the developmental problems at the grassroots, why is there this state of under-development in the rural area? Why is the long hand of justice not catching up with  some of the smart alecs that were once at the helms of our local governments? Or is it that they did not steal enough to warrant their arrest and detention?

I think it is high time we began to probe the activities of those who preside over the affairs of our local government. There is the need for all the state Houses of Assembly in the country to embark on the assessment tour of the projects being executed by the local government chairmen with a view to checking the financial recklessness and high level corruption that have made local government councils in Nigeria a drainpipe and corruptible tier of government.

Boye Salau