Jonathan Eze
Revered monarch and the Awujale of Ijebuland, Oba Sikiru Adetona, political scientist and columnist, Professor Ayo Olukotun and presidential candidate of the Young Peoples Party (YPP), Professor Kingsley Moghalu, have urged that the local government system be either restructured and empowered or be scrapped outrightly.
Speaking at the third annual professorial chair lecture of the Awujale of Ijebuland, with the theme, ‘Grassroots Governance: The soft underbelly of Nigeria political Architecture’, held at the weekend in Ijebu-Ode, Olukotun noted that the country is experiencing a serious governance deficit and that politicians are not addressing the resulting woes.
He expressed that the glaring deficit in governance at all levels is breeding insecurity, social banditry and overall lack of development.
According to the university don, “they are jostling for 2023 while social banditry is on the upscale and insecurity is looming large. The Abuja/Kaduna road is a passport to death while the nation is fast disappearing. The politicians are accumulating power; they are not fighting to alleviate our suffering and woes.”
Alluding to the ineffectual local government administration in the country, Olukotun said, “The local government system is dead, they have failed, we need to replace them, they are the dregs of under-development. The local government is an artificial salad of communities living in an uneasy co-existence. We need to rejig the DNA of our institutions so there will be dynamic activities at the grassroots.”
He further argued that the civic agencies cannot do it alone without the collaboration of state structures and securities.
“The combination of state and non- state will provide a redemptive alternative of what we have now. What we have in our local governments today are the errand boys of political godfathers. The local governments in the country have failed.
“We can’t develop until we get to the grassroots, stressing that the ungoverned spaces where nobody is responsible for anything will give rise to banditry, illegal miners encroaching our spaces. We need to develop a special kind of local government areas and we can’t do it in isolation. It is a constitutional imperative that must be revived by authorities.”
Also, the presidential candidate of the Young Progressive Party (YPP), Professor Kingsley Moghalu, called for the scrapping of the third tier of government whenever the call for restructuring is heeded.
In his remarks, the Vice Chancellor of Olabisi Onabanjo University, Prof. Ganiyu Olatunji Olatunde, described the professorial chair, as one of the budding legacies of the Awujaleof Ijebuland with the aim of permanently creating a basis for research into the problems and issues of governance and with the delivery of governmental processes to the attractions of the citizenry.
He said; “It is worthy to note that the monarch’s professorial endowment that was flagged -off three years ago with over N500 million is the biggest in the history of endowments in this country with supports from members of the board of trustees.”
He further said the topic of the lecture is apt because governance is critical to the survival and the continuing existence of society and national political systems.
Also speaking, Moghalu noted that the local governments have failed and should be scrapped. According to him, it would be hard to put the local government together. There should be two tiers of government; the national government and the subnational government. If the current government is opposed to the restructuring, then we will take it as the failure of the government.
Responding, Oba Adetona thanked guests for honouring him, revealing that he is optimistic that Nigeria would benefit from the initiative and enjoined other well-meaning people to lend their support to a good cause.
