Kelly Stephen Erukpe Ogbaloi is Head, Area Operations and Marketing at Wayne West Africa Limited. He is a Nigerian politician who is currently Edo State chairman, Inter-party Advisory Council, IPAC.
In this interview with Trend Reporters he bared his mind on the issue of local government administration in Nigeria.
Excerpt:
Some Nigerians have advocated scrapping of local government councils in Nigeria, while others believe that the tier of government should be sustained and enhanced for better performance, what is your position on this?
Straight to the point, I do not see why local government administration should be scrapped.
For those who say it should be scrapped, I don’t know what reasons they may have adduced.
To me, the local government administration is the only connection between governance and the people at the grassroots. So, by the time you scrapped that and it is no longer in existence, you find that the ability of those at the grassroots to reach out to the government of the day would be extremely difficult. Even as it is with the existence of the local government they still find things difficult. People at that local level do not immediately access governments as it were; even at the existence of local government now. At the time that is scrapped then of course all of those persons at that level would be fully alienated from the government they serve. For me and straight to the point, local government administration must be retained and everything required to sustain it should be done by government.
You would agree with me that currently local government administration in the country is not effective. What do you think can be done to make it effective?
First of all the ineffectiveness of local government administration has to do with the connection it has with the state government, because whatever is the responsibility of the local government, it is almost shared or being directed by the state government that currently supervises the local government. So, first of all, the supervision of local government or the existence of local government should not be dependent on the mechanism of the state where they are operating. That relationship must be cut-off. Local government needs to be fully autonomous and independent of the state government.
Today, you find out that most of the laws or rather the checking of local government is done from the states house of assembly. That should not be.
So, if that is still happening, what now happens to that local house of assembly that has been created by the law?
A good number of councilors at the local government form a sort of a house for the local government. So what are they doing, if the state houses of assembly still interfere with the doings; internal doings especially, of the local government.
For me, they should cut off extreme relationship with state government. They should be given that push to be able to do things independently on their own as a tier of government.
Currently, election into local councils is being conducted by state independent electoral commission. Are you in support of this?
When we are asking for severance of relationship that would ordinarily override what the local government is expected to do, we mean that every mechanism that bring them together in term of even the local government election should be cut off.
All federal institutions that are in charge of conducting elections and all other things that are therein attached should be made to also work with the local government. So, we shouldn’t subject local government election to state whims and caprices before it could be done.
