This column rarely agrees with former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s often trenchant, truculent, intemperate and superficial views on issues, events and personalities. It is my view that Chief Obasanjo is too preoccupied with diligently seeking to remove the speck in the eyes of others while steadfastly ignoring the monstrous log sticking out of his face, believing perhaps that it is an adornment of great attraction. His readiness to maul people he believes are his adversaries and to strip them naked in the market place, for me, symbolises an irritating and annoying sense of hubris. It also betrays a desperate bid to hide some deep-seated psychological disorientation beneath the garb of brashness and an unwarranted sense of self-importance.
But there are times when you must be intellectually honest enough to admit that the man is right even while fundamentally disagreeing with his methods as well as his delusion that he is not also culpable for Nigeria’s post-colonial woes. He was given the rare and unprecedented opportunity to preside over the affairs of Nigeria, first as a military Head of State then an elected President for two terms. On the two occasions he left the country worse off. But then, I digress. Obasanjo certainly got it right, for instance, when he recently wrote an excoriating letter to the National Assembly leadership vehemently condemning the humongous, opaque and immoral amounts of public resources the legislators appropriate to themselves annually for the most frivolous reasons. His stance resonated, well with large swathes of the public because of the grim economic crisis under which millions of Nigerians are suffering in agony.
The defensive response of some of the legislators was to the effect that as President, Obasanjo tried to induce the National Assembly to give a stamp of legality to his aborted Third Term agenda designed to perpetuate himself in office. In other words, he has no business moralising to the National Assembly because corruption was rife in the system even when Obasanjo was Head of State. This surely cannot be a credible defence. The import of this reasoning is that the legislators are conceding that they are criminally enriching themselves to the detriment of the welfare of the vast majority of Nigerians because there was corruption in the system before their election as national legislators. The reasoning is untenable.
Obasanjo’s remarks at the inaugural conference of the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (IGPP) at the University of Ibadan, on Monday, February 1, were also largely true and thought provoking although he opened himself to charges of hypocrisy, which may not be entirely untenable. On that occasion, Obasanjo attributed Nigeria’s stunted growth to state governors who, in his view, allegedly divert huge revenue allocations meant for the Local Government Councils to other purposes. The governors, according to Obasanjo had rendered public institutions in their domains irrelevant for all practical purposes.
In Obasanjo’s searing words – “Is there good governance in the 36 states of the federation where some governors have become sole administrators acting like Emperors? These governors have rendered public institutions irrelevant and useless. Is there development going on in the 774 constitutionally recognised local governments which are known to have been appropriated by governors? And, of course, when governors take their money, the chairmen of the councils take the balance of the money, put it on the table and share among council members”.
Lamenting that Nigeria has not internalised the necessary values imperative for the sustenance of presidentialism and federalism Obasanjo said: “When are we going to able to practice federalism in a way that promotes healthy competition among the states for the benefit of the citizens? When are we going to subordinate partisanship to collective goals and deploy the full potential of our diversity to advance public causes that serve the aspirations of the teeming masses of our people crying out under the cringe of poverty, disease, unemployment and neglect’”.
Of course, many will dismiss Obasanjo’s lamentations here as nothing but deceptive and sanctimonious posturing. And they surely have a point. Obasanjo has no right to claim that any governor is behaving like an emperor and undermine public institutions. He is the least qualified person to lecture any one on the virtues of federalism. As President of Nigeria for eight years – 1999 and 2007, Obasanjo behaved like an imperial President. He was the ultimate President as Emperor. He manipulated the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to impeach governors through ways that flagrantly breached the constitution.
He forcefully and illegally withheld the allocation of funds meant for Local Government Councils in Lagos just because the state exercised her constitutional right to create 37 new councils. Up till the end of his tenure, Obasanjo refused to obey the Supreme Court judgement affirming that the Federal Government had no right or powers to withhold any funds statutorily allocated to any tier of government.
Beyond this, in his sweeping generalization of the governors as being responsible for the country’s stunted development, Obasanjo does not take into account the skewed fiscal allocation formula that allocates over 57% of the country’s revenues to the Federal Government while the 36 states and 774 Local Government Councils share approximately 43%. Where then can the funds be to fuel development in a meaningful manner especially when the constitution constricts many states, especially the states rich in mineral and other natural resources, from exploiting such endowment for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of their people. Obasanjo had the opportunity as two-term President for eight years to bequeath to the nation a viable revenue allocation formula that reflects genuine fiscal federalism and enables all tiers of government to serve as engines of development in their respective zones. He failed abysmally and woefully in this regard.
But then, it will be most irresponsible and unproductive to throw the baby away with the bathwater. We must distinguish between the messenger and the message. The critical point Obasanjo raises centres on how the 774 Local Government areas can be made viable and development-driven. It is a genuine concern we must all share. Local governments across the country are widely perceived as citadels of corruption and sordid emblems of inefficiency and manifest unproductivity. Obasanjo’s claim that state governors divert monies accruing to Local Government Councils is only part of the story. The truth is that even with the funds available to them, the various councils could still do much more than they are presently.
Some have recommended that the States/Local Government Joint Account to which all monies accruing to the Local Government from the Federation Account are paid before being distributed to the Local Governments should be scrapped. They believe this will enhance the autonomy of Local Governments by enabling them to receive their allocations directly from the Federation Account. This arrangement could be fraught with danger of tying the Local Governments to the apron string of the Federal Government and strengthening the centralist impulses in the federation at the expense of the greater decentralisation we desire.
Others have suggested that the idea of elected Local Governments under the control of the states should be done away with and replaced with that of administrative local units under the total control of the state government. Yet others contend that the presidential system obtainable at the local government should be discarded and the local councils resort to the parliamentary system that was the practice before the various local government reforms of the military era. These suggestions are simply ways of running away from rather than solving the problem. To do away with elected local government councils will rob grassroots communities the opportunity to participate in deciding who governs them at the tier of government closest to the ordinary man. In the same vein, a reversion to the parliamentary system at the local government level cannot solve any problem. The values that sabotage and make a presidential system of government unworkable will also have the same effect on a parliamentary style of government.
Although there are no easy solutions to the emergence of a viable, vigorous, transparent and effective Local Government system, I offer one suggestion as a starting point. And that is to ensure free, fair and credible elections at the grassroots where votes are not just counted but they actually count. This will entail either scrapping the State Independent Electoral Commissions (SIEC) and transferring their functions to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) or strengthening the autonomy of SIEC and transform them from the cruel mockery of democracy and integrity they are today. A vibrant electoral process at the grass roots that lets people have a genuine say in who or which party governs them at any point in time will begin to create the real revolutionary ferment at the grassroots that will also strengthen democracy at other levels of government.
NATION
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