Economists are reveling in the IGRs of Lagos and Enugu states whereas Human Development Index (HDI) and Income per head remain abysmally low in same states. In same states household incomes remain poor, primary schools are poorly maintained, health centers are not well tended to; sanitation and housing are in squalor state whereas rural areas remain abandoned in socio-economic irrelevance. The biggest problem of the economist is that they appear only interested in figures and coefficients of government earnings. Beware of them!
When we had beautiful figures for GDP due to oil cash receipts, Sanusi, the central Bank governor and economists celebrated this. They even at one time reveled in shooting ahead of RSA to become the strongest economy in Africa, yet on the strength of oil cash-induced GDP figures. Yet, the GDP figures of which economists vaunted did not reflect the standard of living of the people in the resource-cursed state and hence HDI and income per head remained astronomically higher in RSA than in Nigeria.
As economists again celebrate the increase in IGR a cogent fear is that state governments could be turning LGAs into cash cows to the detriment of their tax-paying populace who expect reward for their taxes in their neighborhoods. In the case of Lagos, with 40 LCDAs—a figure which feasibility yet beats my imagination, the Lagos state government expects the LCDAs to contribute to the state IGR by their tax remittances to the state. The LCDAs then embark on taxation drives exacting more from the populace with minimal avenues for wealth-earning created to avoid over-taxation of them—and largely same trend plays out in the rest of the country. In fact, a state governor is even enabled to take over any revenue-earner of an LGA if they thought it could add valuably to the state’s revenue base. The result of this is a unitary system where the taxes of the local people and enterprises are used for the sustenance of state government which could discretionarily choose where to put the money.
Unfortunately, the ability of the people to ensure that more of their taxes is used in their localities is equally not aided by the very basic and lean political systems within states whereby the LGAs stand no chance in the balance of powers between itself and the state government. First, the states have no constitution which enables the people articulate for themselves the spheres of influence of both tiers of governance. Worse still, the existing Constitution of the Federal Republic pitiably leaves LGAs at the mercies of the states in the following ways:
• It provides for a joint FG monthly allocations to state and LGAs with the state governor being in charge of the purse.
• The Governor of a state decides the tenure of an LGA chairman and could dissolve the offices of council chairmen and ward councilors’ and replace same with Care-taker Committee Chairman who are usually associates of the governor.
• A State Assembly could indefinitely suspend a local council chairman
• Ward Councilors at a local council could not impeach their Local Government Chairman except they secured the endorsement of the state governor.
We do not need LGAs which are cash cows to states: we need LGAs that are by law independent and robust enough to take decisions and actions not violable by state governors. LGAs should be able to have substantive spheres of 6taxations and responsibility to cater for their localities. They should be able to ensure good town-planning, functional schools that satisfactorily deliver basic education, recreational facilities, Trunk C roads, efficient drainage systems, good public sanitation and refuse disposals systems, efficient primary health care delivery facilities and as such reduction in maternal mortality rates.
We do not need LGAs which are cash cows to states: we need LGAs that are by law independent and robust enough to take decisions and actions not violable by state governors. LGAs should be able to have substantive spheres of 6taxations and responsibility to cater for their localities. They should be able to ensure good town-planning, functional schools that satisfactorily deliver basic education, recreational facilities, Trunk C roads, efficient drainage systems, good public sanitation and refuse disposals systems, efficient primary health care delivery facilities and as such reduction in maternal mortality rates.
Clearly, therefore, to achieve the so-called Millennium Development Goals, we need to fix the structure of our LGAs. However, when the Euro-centric MDGs were set for developing countries, our FG and various state governments set up schemes and programs for the achievement of these goals whose cost must have definitely run into billions of naira. With such programs, projects and schemes unsustainable and being morbidly unable to achieve what they were supposedly created for and with rent-seeking, political patronage run its course, that whole MDGs drama fizzled having enriched many of its agents for life whereas our people remain In squalor in their neighborhoods. The truth is this: Nigeria if it accepted the truth of itself should have called Europe’s bluff on its MDGs and proceeded to work on its peculiar political structure that makes those items contained in the MDGs unattainable.
The whole essence (soul) of governance is to consistently provide social deliverables as mentioned to its people by means of their tax contributions. If governance would not live up to these responsibilities while of good GDPs and IGRs, then, perhaps, it could as well serve at best, as entity that exists for its own separate purposes and at worst, as a colonizer of its own people which rakes in huge wealth by their taxation and spends same in manners and spheres that least affect their lives. This is the dimension to governance which economists are horrendously ignorant of, as they seem more interested in computing government revenue figures and coefficients and less interested in how those monies affect the lives of the governed. In short the Nigerian economist seems morbidly ignorant of the fact that national economies could not be fixed without fixing national politics.
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