by Nasiru Suwaid

To be sure, none of the issues in contention in the current reviewed document, has presented a clear and a glaring case of injustice, as the way many state governments have abused the local government system.

The local government system is a problematic concept to situate. For this reason, there is no institution of government that is abused, confused, disputed and misunderstood. This problematique, expresses itself in the local governments structure, the personnel managing it, the infrastructure supporting it, the requisite laws guiding it, and even the constitutional norm authorizing it. ,

As a matter of fact, even the 1999 Constitution tip toes at the terrain of the local council, mentioning that critical tier of government only in silence, and consigning all provisions guarding, guiding, and governing local government administration to the remit of the state House of Assembly.

So bizarre is the arrangement that, even the institution itself exhibits a character uniquely different from other tiers of government. For instance, while the federal government and the state government have adopted the doctrine of separation of power as a guiding principle, in the relationship between the executive and the legislature, the same is not the case in the local council arrangement.

Thus, a supervisory councilor maintains a functional duality, in the heading the local government executive department, while at the same time making byelaws in the local government legislative council.

So many citizens could not contain their joy, when some few days ago, the House of Representatives passed an amendment to the 1999 constitution, altering Section 7, which empowered the state legislature to make laws for the administrative operation of the local government areas and amending Section 162 of the same constitution, which has authorized the existence of a State and Local Governments Joint Account, and replacing it with a Special Federal Account, upon which the 774 local governments in Nigeria would draw their due federal allocation, circumventing the obnoxious intercession of the various state governments in the polity.

To be sure, none of the issues in contention in the current reviewed document, has presented a clear and a glaring case of injustice, as the way many state governments have abused the local government system.

Here are some examples of the abuse: the refusal to conduct democratic elections, paving the way for the appointment of subservient and unaccountable administrators to hold the reign of power; but more heinous, is the illegal expenditure of local government funds via the usurious state and local governments joint projects.

In essence, what the constitutional review wished to achieve was to make the third tier of the government truly independent of the two senior and illustrious forms of the government, to wit, the almighty federal government and the mighty state governments.

Yet there are those, for whom it seems that the intended autonomy granted to an inexperienced tier of government, has not been well thought out. For them, this was an evident misadventure for the National Assembly to grant powers that are clearly beyond the competence of the local governments to perform.

AOne man who has been loud and argumentative about this has been the Minority Leader of the House of Representatives in the person of Mr. Femi Gbajabiamila, who confirmed on a Channels Television interview that, although the amendment granting autonomy has been effected, the minor details of how the constitution could concretize such autonomy, has not being given practicable and workable reality in a way to ensure a smooth and effective local government structure.

Technically, this is where the problem lies. Whereas a local government in Nigeria is only capable of making bye laws through the local government legislative council; a financially autonomous local government needs to pass expenditure laws for an effective and legally accountable tier of the government. In essence, there most be a reversal of the norm before the constitutional review granting autonomy to the local areas, where it was the state House of Assembly that performed such task of passing the expenditure vote of the councils areas into law.

The question then remains: now that they have become autonomous and independent forms of government, who would pass their budget law? Would they be able to make and pass their own laws, knowing full well that that a law passed by the National Assembly is called an Act of the legislative parliament, while the one passed by the state House of Assembly is called a state Law.  What would be the name of the law passed by the local government legislative council be called?

It is pertinent to note that principally, what the National Assembly did in its review of the 1999 constitution was to merely amend the two sections hindering administrative and financial autonomy of the local government areas in Nigeria, which are the provisions of Section 7 and that of Section 162.

However, the mere altering of these sections of the constitution does not enable a local government to pass any other law other than a bye law, which does not have the codified status of an enacted statute or even the legislative recognition of a written law. Rather, what we have is a bye law making institution, through the instrumentality of a local government legislative council, burdened with the task of making budgetary expenditure laws, without the requisite powers, recognition, experience, capacity or even the wherewithal to do it.

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Op-ed pieces and contributions are the opinions of the writers only and do not represent the opinions of Y!/YNaija.