KATSINA STATE GOVERNOR'S POLITICAL POLIO
Katsina state governor is creative with words. Trouble is that he is threatening fire and brimstone, too. And it is against his local council chairmen; no, against his local government caretaker committee chairmen. Council Chairmen don’t perform, Governor Ibrahim Shema said. The fact that polio is yet to be eradicated in the state was his reason. So His Excellency threatened to relieve them of their post. And he was creative the way he put it; a reason one may wonder if his hearers had laughed at the time he issued his threat, except that this is not a laughing matter. It goes beyond threatening caretaker chairmen, it is beyond Katsina State; it calls to question a whole lot of issues in the polity, especially at it affects the relationship between the state and the local government councils.
“In 2010 and 2011, Katsina did not record any case of polio; unfortunately between January and date; we have recorded nine cases of polio,” Governor Shema had said. So he added,” I want to make it clear that any local government caretaker chairman who allows any child to be infected by the disease will also have a political polio and you know what polio does to a person,’’ Polio outbreaks, like any other issue has been a source of embarrassment to the nation. Along with Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan are the other two countries in the world that everyone mentions from Los Angeles to Tokyo as having incidences of polio outbreak. Just to ensure that future generation of Nigerians have their limbs intact, that’s what this polio war is all about – yet the government cannot get it right. So what can they get right? Now Katsina state governor shifts the blame to local council chairmen. He is not alone. Not long ago, Borno state governor did the same. He had been less creative, more direct, and he didn’t have only polio in mind. He targeted the six six-child killer diseases, and another that does not kill children – tree planting. “Any chairman who fails to take issues of polio immunization and tree planting with all seriousness is nailing his political career,” His Excellency, the governor of Borno state, had said. He then went on to give instructions on how his twenty-seven appointed caretaker chairmen should eradicate polio and fight desertification, too.
On the face of it, the afore-mentioned examples should mean nothing, and the more important message should be that the objective of eradicating polio is achieved. But there is more to this grandstanding, and statements such as these that state governors have made in recent past. It calls to question the manner local administration is carried out, and the effect of it on a matter as simple as eradication of polio in the country. And there is another question here. Leaving threats aside, are there enough reasons for a local council chairman to commit himself to any meaningful programmes in his domain? Now, the practice is that state governors select party members and friends, and place them at the head of Committees to administer local government councils. Yet this is the third tier of government, recognized and empowered by the Constitution. It is meant to be independent in its internal affairs. The occasion that governors organize elections are far and in-between. Why do they deny this third tier of government the democratic process that brought the governors themselves to power?
Many reasons have been proffered. Two are prominent. One is stronger than the other, and that other is the fear of opposition wrestling local councils away from governors’ grips. Access to funds for local council as made available from the national treasury is the stronger reason. State governors collect what is due to them, and add to it what is allocated to the local government councils. In that case, a local council chairman whose Council gets over a hundred million naira a month is given less than a third of that by the state governor. In Ekiti State, the Commissioner of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs counseled the chairmen lately not to distance themselves from the Ministry, so that they could receive sound counsel on how to administer their domains. Around the same time, the female deputy governor of the state warned that council chairmen should beware of expending funds unless the state government approves it. This is the practice across the states. In a situation where no chairman is sure of what, how much initiative that would be beneficial to the people at the grass root would he have the drive to undertake? In a situation where the chairman is an extension of the fingers of the governor, how much commitment can he have to the well-being of the people he administers?
The amount of affront on the provisions of the nation’s Constitution, with this practice of appointing chairmen for local councils, is one out of the many implications for the polity. And it is not as if the governors are not aware of this. The Supreme Court has made enough pronouncements on issues that relate to the relationship between states and local government such that Their Excellencies can be properly guided. But everyone looks on. Maybe one should even let the president be, whose responsibility it is to uphold the constitution as a whole. And maybe the Attorneys-General of the Federation should also be overlooked, abandoned to their devices, because many of them get the post in order to block anti-graft agencies, and thereby offer protection for cronies of the presidents in office, rather than be keen to drag to court any state governor that flouts the provisions of the Constitution. Ironically, state governors are bolder at collectively dragging the federal government to court over what they say is breach of the constitution when it comes to sharing the content of the national treasury. But the same federal government looks the other way as governors take funds that the constitution allots to the local government councils.
Sometimes, one wonders if many of the individuals in state government houses that put chains on local council areas have the capacity to think things through. And that is putting it nicely. Or else, the question need not be raised: Don’t they think it is to their advantage to have elected men in offices at that third tier of government? Don’t they consider that much of the problems that are now left for the state governments to solve could have been dealt with if council chairmen have the wherewithal to plan and execute local initiatives that are targeted at addressing peculiar and local challenges? Some state experience flooding, for instance. The state governors have collected ecological funds and blew it. They have trapped funds meant for council areas and swallowed it. Every incentive there is for Council chairmen to encourage agriculture and other local initiatives in their locality is removed. The desire to perform as elected chairmen, so that their people could support them for higher political aspirations is non-existent. Yet this is how politicians build themselves up for higher responsibilities in saner, more democratic climes.
Can any Nigerian see how horribly lacking in experience the nation’s political administrators are at the moment? That’s one effect when the system and its skewed practices encourage politicians to start from the top, rather than the bottom. One doesn’t think state governors would be bothered about all of this. Many of them are too busy looking for what to grab anyway. But something simple should have applied. If state governors lord it over the third tier of government to the extent that the entire polity is hurt; if they carry on as they wish without a care about the larger implications on the nation, the government at the centre ought to do everything possible to make them comply with the provisions of the law of the land. This is because the negative effect of this undemocratic practice goes farther than the boundaries of each state. When international experts stand on global podia and count names of places where the obnoxious practices of state governors have led to a situation where nothing drives council chairman to want to wipe out a child disease such as polio, for instance, it is not Katsina state or Borno state that is mentioned, it is Nigeria. No wonder when Rotary Club, a major stakeholder in the fight to eradicate polio came calling days back, it was the Vice-president who had to make the pledge that the fight against the child disease will be made a daily affair, rather than a seasonal thing that it used to be. Cleary, state governors cause damage to the polity by the kind of relationship they maintain with council areas, yet when the effects come, it is the federal government and every other segment of the nation that answers for it.
It is therefore high time that the federal government and every concerned segment of the nation, including the civil society and the lawmakers, do what they can under the law to right the wrong in the relationship between the states and the local government councils. That effort embarked upon recently to review the constitution may be one way out of this quagmire, if governors chose to be deaf to the courts. Every stakeholder needs to key into it.
Written By Tunji Ajibade
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