President Ahmed Bola Tinubu would be advancing on Nigeria’s democratic process if the much-talked about reformation of the local government system so as to return it to the local people, just as the name implies, instead of the current wholesale unconstitutional usurpation being brought to bear on it by the state governments, who do not understand why the Constitution clearly “guaranteed” the local government system for the country. It was a deliberate prescription calculated to reinforce the substratum of the Republic because as the foundational level of government, any harm done to the local governments is a direct hit on the constitutional palladium on which the entire political entity of Nigeria rests, i.e., the People.
The various state capitals and Abuja are just too far away for the ordinary citizen who just wants to have a functional road leading to his house, the clearing of the drainage across the road, a good school to educate his children and a medical centre to visit when he is sick. That is why we have local governments. They cater for such immediate everyday needs of the people and the earlier they are allowed to function as democratically as possible, the better for the current frosty people-government relationship characterised by a massive distrust of the government by the governed.
As we extensively argued here some time ago, “It is quite regrettable that in spite of the enormous resources at her disposal, Nigeria as a sovereign state entity has not done well as much as she is expected by most parameters for assessing national development. Several factors such as the monumental ineptitude exhibited in national leadership from inception, imperfect constitutional structure, undemocratic political processes, corrupt social and moral environments, wayward political culture, etc., have been variously blamed for the monumental failure.
The sad reality is that beyond those obvious, growth militating, factors is the greater but hardly addressed obstacle that is occasioned by the fundamental failure of those who have managed the country from independence till date to consciously align the best interests of the Nation with those of the State. Curiously, that is one area that has not been seriously evaluated while we endlessly pontificate on ‘the failure of Nigeria.’”
The blame for this retarding antagonism between the “State” and the “Nation” in Nigeria lies squarely with those who inaugurated the Republic in 1960 who could not see the overriding necessity to actively foster a sense of belonging amongst the various nationalities that entered independence with the Nigerian State. This error was further compounded by the military that seized power in 1966 but had little or no idea about where the Republic was headed and then proceeded, ignorantly, to undermine the federal arrangement under which the various nationalities within the young Republic were held together under a fledging state.
For clarity, whereas the “Nation” is made up of the peoples encased within the boundaries of Nigeria, the constitutional “State” (referred to in section 2 of the Constitution), on the other hand, is the encasing political institution, more like a corporation, that was created out of the colonial process through which the will of the resulting “nation” is expected to be manifest with the legal capacity of a sovereign state.
The various nationalities, peoples and communities encased within, starting with the colonial process, were made to handover their collective sovereignties to a new entity called Nigeria with the understanding (Social Contract) that the resulting State entity would provide good governance and ensure the people’s (nation’s) wellbeing. To bring that expectation to fruition, a federal structure was adopted, ostensibly in view of the size and variegated nature of the hitherto pre-colonial polities with the important assurance of local autonomy for the nationalities.
In a sense, what we call the Federal Government is actually a conceptual construct brought into being for the management of the emergent complex and variegated political entity as it does not automatically command any cultural, linguistic, ancestral or communal loyalty from the people unless it is able to make itself civically useful and indispensable to them. For example, we can choose to change the nomenclature of Nigeria to any other name but we cannot give a different identity to any of the ethnic nationalities that made the up the Union: An Ibo national will forever remain an Ibo man, same for the Yoruba or Hausa man, etc. That is why nobody is a native of the federal government.
On the contrary, we all know the ethnic nationality, local governments and our states of origins; federal officials must come from, and after service return to, their various home states. This fact is textually acknowledged by the Constitution in section 2 subsection (2) where it provides that “Nigeria shall be a Federation consisting of States and a Federal Capital Territory”. In other words, without the federating states there will be nothing like Nigeria but without Nigeria the various nationalities will still endure as they have always been.
With respect to the states, they would equally be nothing if there were no local communities or councils aggregating to provide the territorial bases on which they are founded. Structurally, the federation of Nigeria is founded on the territories of the local governments through the states. The stark irony, however, is that it is the same local governments, the foundation of the national political structure, that have been finding it difficult to operate within the federal system. It is therefore misleading for people to be lamenting the faulty federal structure without first considering what is happening at the foundations below.
To the extent that the calls for the wholesale restructuring of the federal system in Nigeria ignore the weaknesses in the local governments, I think the whole efforts are seriously flawed because there is no way that the Centre can function properly if it is established on weak and debilitated foundations.
The so-called “Federal Might,” as we are wont to flaunt it, would actually be hollow if the local governments, closer to the people within the federal structure, are not functioning properly. Since 1976 when the Dasuki Committee on Local Government Reform’s Report was released, the indispensability of a viable local government system to our federal arrangement has been confirmed but successive administrations, military and civilian, have ignored this political reality all to their peril.
It is a well-known fact that the various states governments have kleptocratically rendered the local governments across the country inoperative by the way they have denied them their legitimate constitutional entitlements in terms of political capacities and financial viability.
As at today, I do not know of any state in the federation where any of these clearly stated guarantees have been implemented as constitutionally prescribed. Instead, the governors unconstitutionally invade their local governments, sack the duly elected councils’ members and appoint in their place illegal “caretakers,” stooges as conduit pipes for siphoning monies and resources constitutionally allocated to the local governments.
What is more, it has become the norm since the inception of this Republic that state governments have turned local government elections into monumental shams and abominable charades; they simply write out names for the state election commissions, which they mechanically reel off as “winners” irrespective of whether or not anyone voted for them. It is political counterfeiting at its worst. The massive corruption of the electoral processes at the local government level by the various state governments has given democracy a very bad name.
If truly democracy is “a government of the People by the People and for the People,” then, the local governments, being the closest to the people, in my view, approximate more to what the Greeks had in mind when they invented democracy. Unfortunately, that has not been the case with our local governments.