GOVERNORS SHOULD LEAVE LOCAL GOVTS ALONE -USMAN

•Abatemi-Usman Senator Nurudeen Abatemi-Usman representing Kogi Central on the platform of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is the vice chairman of Senate Committee on Niger Delta. With his pedigree as the youngest Senator in the Seventh Senate and as an accomplished engineer and management consultant, he has been one of the most vibrant and vocal voices in the current National Assembly.

Recently, his private member bill captioned, 'Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (Further Alteration) Bill' scaled through first reading on the floor of the Red Chamber. In this interview, he explained the grounds for the Bill. He equally spoke on other issues of national importance.

Excerpts… What motivated your sponsorship of the Constitution Amendment Bill seeking financial autonomy for Local Government Councils?

My vantage position of being around the grassroots, of being close to my people at home and the fact that the last three local government chairmen of my local government have been personal friends of mine made me to know the shortchanging that comes at the end of every month.

This is after the monthly allocation by the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC) in Abuja and advertisement of allocations due every state and every local government, and what at the end of the day the local government areas in my community report as their actual dues after the joint state and local government accounts. Being that close, seeing how much the joint account is being abused, how much it is subjected to a lot of fraudulent activities, I have always known that if ever I have a chance, I will not hesitate to move for a statutory change. This is because the essence of coming to a system that we operate, the three tier system with the local government being at the base, nearest to the people to bring about the impact of actual governance to the people and base communities is being completely defeated and completely negated.

You can't but want another thought about how this can be done. Certainly, the way it is now, it is not working. And one of the reasons it is not working is that the local governments are greatly hampered by the non-remittance of what is written against their name and what they actually get at the end of the day. This is what motivated me to push for this constitutional point and incidentally, it is the first constitutional matter coming up on the floor of this 7th Senate by way of a bill.

But don't you think that apart from the need for financial autonomy by local governments, they also need total autonomy as an independent tier of government?

I can't agree more with you. We run a federation with federating units and three tiers of government: the federal, state and local governments. I have no doubt in my mind that the local governments particularly have been at the receiving end. They are almost muzzled out of existence really because of the way the law has been structured before now, which is exactly the reason why I am pushing for this change. Actually, it isn't only in the area of financial autonomy that local governments need to be able to breathe more easily.

They also need other forms of aid. The way and manner we have structured the emergence of local government councils is one of the issues in point by which you can make them breathe more easily. For instance, Local government elections are controlled by statutory bodies known as the States Independent Electoral Commissions which in turn are controlled totally by a single man in the name of a governor and he isn't helping the natural emergence of a truly independent people who have ideas of how to go about running the local councils in complement of the state government.

So, of course, it is not only the issue of financial autonomy that needs to be addressed. I think such issues as to how local government chairmen and councilors emerge, through which body, should it be a state electoral body or should we go back to when one electoral body was organizing it throughout the federation? All these are very crucial issues as well. But I feel it is necessary to start from this point and perhaps one or two more colleagues of mine may now join me and find a new push for amendment that will ultimately strengthen and make the local government system deliver on the true objective of why we had to have a federating unit that is close to the people.

Do you not think the governors have too much overbearing influence on the local government chairmen? How do you think the local government helmsmen could be weaned from the apron strings of the state governors?

This is exactly what we seek to do. What exists right now is that the local government is not in its true meaning, a federating unit. It is so because you are not a government if you are not able to provide some basic things. And chief of all, the resources needed to provide these basic things as a government is funding, is finance. If somebody else is in control as it is in our laws right now with the joint state and local government account, what you are describing will always be so. You can imagine it would have been the same. What has saved the country at this point are the recent changes in our laws, the recent pronouncements of the law courts whereby the federal government is being told that you are not in control of everything, so the states are freer.

We also need to extend the same thing to the local governments. The local governments are a federating unit just like the states, indeed, just like the federal government. They need to be in charge. If somebody else is holding your purse, of course he is going to be able to control you, he is going to dictate to you. It is for that singular reason of the state-local government joint account that you find out that yes, because that is the law, if you do not take what the governor gives you or what the state and local government joint account says is due to you, then because you owe everything in conjunction with the way and manner you emerged through the state electoral commission, which is a roll call. What we have now is just a roll call. We do not have elections at the local government level. What we have now is a fraud. The remedies are financial autonomy and the review of the state electoral commission. If it continues this way, we are headed for some danger. What sort of danger it is I am unable to forecast. But certainly we can't continue with the way we are running the local government administration.

Does the proposed bill make adequate provision for accountability at the local government level so that if eventually it sails through, the local government administrators will be prudent in the way they exercise their new found autonomy so that we are not back to square one?

You see, accountability is part of our laws. You do not have to make special pronouncement on that. Our laws and our governing rules provide for accountability. In the system of governance, there is accountability. There is a legislative arm of local government council.

And also, we have agencies of government that, if you choose not to be accountable, can come knocking at your door asking you questions about accountability. These are not the old days. This is a new time and Nigerians are getting to know it is a new order, a new order of the rule of law.

What is your view on the Federal Government's plan to remove fuel subsidy as from next year?

We have all the money we need if we can just plug all the holes where squandering and fraud are taking place. So much money go down the drains simply because you do not want to think out of the box. All you want to do is subject Nigerians to further hardship of removal of fuel subsidy. We do not need to talk about fuel subsidy. Let's strengthen our tax collection mechanism; let's strengthen the fight against corruption; let's strengthen our laws and I tell you, we would have abundance of resources to spend. But as it is now, we so easily come to remove fuel subsidy. It didn't start with this government.

President Jonathan is doing nothing new. Governments before him have easily come to this obstacle of resources for government to provide basic amenities to the people by just simply going to the fuel subsidy hoax. No, we keep thinking inside the box, but we need to move outside of the box. There are ways of generating funds for governance. We already have them; we need to strengthen them. Tax is one; corruption is another; making the right investment is another. How can you be talking of Vision 20:2020 when you are not addressing the basic infrastructure of steel. Steel is the main prerequisite for infrastructure.

When you get steel right then, you get energy right, then you get the roads right, then you get communications right because all these three sectors are also dependent on steel. There is no one of the 20 nations that are the most industrialized today that is not producing steel. And when you start producing steel, it would give you a new, totally virgin stream of revenue that will nearly rival oil and forever you will stop thinking about subjecting the masses to further hardship because you now have something totally new that you have not really tapped. People advising Mr. President are not giving him the best form of advice.

Without mentioning names, we have some western economic hit men in the team. They are hit men. They are called hit men in the international finance world. They come to sabotage your economy so that we can continue to depend and export everything from the Western nations; so that we can be providing jobs for their people while our own people at home have no jobs; so that we can be subjecting our people to further hardships while they are saving their people. There are economic hit men in this current government. And without mentioning names, we know them.