Stop giving funds monthly to LG Caretaker Committees, Audu Ogbeh urged FG.
States whose governors have established caretaker committees for LG administrations should not continue to get monthly allocations, according to Audu Ogbeh, a former minister of agriculture.
The highest court in the land has ruled that “any governor who establishes a caretaker committee should not receive any funds because a caretaker is illegal.” Withdraw their own funds and retain them, not transmit them, the 76-year-old former minister stated on Friday.
The country’s third level of government, the 774 LGAs, has been ineffective due to the domineering and dominating behaviour of a few governors who have been accused of misusing monies intended for their administration.
A growing number of Nigerians have been demanding more power for their local governments in recent months. The president is on board with the demands, and in May, the federal government sued 36 state governors for suspected misappropriation of public funds.
As it is, 52.68% goes to the feds and 26.72% to the states. The country’s monthly revenue is distributed to LGs by the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) after being allocated 20.60% by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), which is under the Presidency.
The interesting part is that LG receives money from both state and local governments, which they deposit into a shared account.
Ogbeh, a former PDP national chairman, claims that the federal government need to transfer LG revenues away from shared accounts and into accounts under the exclusive control of local government administrations.
“I cannot send you money that simply disappears.” They claim to be paying workers, but you don’t fix primary schools and do nothing with the money. What kind of tasks are you referring to? Do you usually start your day with a stroll and a glass of palm wine? The problems are these. “The country is facing dangerous problems as a result of those failures,” he said.
He added that some governors have cronies serve as interim chairmen of local governments, receive stipends, and then embezzle substantial sums of money meant for local government administration.
The agricultural minister of Nigeria, Lateef Fagbemi, backed efforts by the federal government to give state and local governments more control over budgets and laws from 2015 to 2019.
A meeting of the president and the 36 governors of the states should be called for, he said, to discuss the future of local governments.
The Benue lawmaker claimed that the country would be spared a lot of its typical social and environmental issues if the LG system worked as intended.
Unfortunately, this system is not functioning properly. Many of these problems would go away if the system was working correctly. “You have a governor in the state, and there are between 10 and 15 local governments, and the local government is failing,” remarked the governor.
He said that governors should see local governments as partners in improving the lives of their citizens, especially when it comes to supplying clean water, preventing diseases like cholera, repairing rundown elementary and secondary school buildings, storing medications at healthcare facilities under their authority, and providing other basic necessities.
We should eliminate the LG system, according to the ex-minister, if governors won’t let it work.
He pointed out, “What I want to say to Nigerians is that if we don’t want the local government system, scrap it; if allowed to work, it would have been a fantastic system.”
According to him, governors are infuriating the general public by forcibly removing legitimately elected LG chairman and replacing them with caretaker chairs.