Attorney General of the Federation, Lateef Gagbemi, has said a major bottleneck in the functioning of the local government in the country is the State Electoral Commission (SECs), which he suggested should be scrapped if the LGAs will function properly.
SECs are responsible for the conduct of elections at the state level as well as the local government level.
Fagbemi who has begun a push to free the LGAs from the control of governors with an institution of a suit at the Supreme Court on behalf of the federal government argued that governors have abused their control of the third tier of government.
Speaking on Monday at a one-day ‘Discourse on National Nigeria’s Security Challenges and Good Governance At the Local Government Levels’, Fagbemi said governors have latched on to the inadequacies and lacunas in some sections of the 1999 Constitution to undermine and render local governments redundant.
He accused governors of exploiting the weaknesses of Section 7(1); Section 83(3); Section 7(5) and others to impose their will on the local governments in the country.
He noted that these inadequacies have allowed the governors to abuse the rights of local governments and in turn, deprive people at the grassroots to feel their presence.
He pointed out that the most prominent abuse of local government was the use of state electoral commissions to impose leaders at the local government levels through sham elections while most Governors only appoint caretaker leadership in their local governments.
Specifically, the Attorney General identified the abuse of State/ local governments’ joint accounts by state governors as imposing a fiscal emasculation thus rendering the local governments poor as the governors hold on to their federal allocations.
Consequently, he called for the scrapping of State Electoral Commissions to allow democracy to take its roots in the local governments.
He urged the organisers of the event, the House of Representatives, to engineer a robust constitutional amendment that will remove all encumbrances hindering the development of local governments and their ability to fulfil their constitutionally recognized functions.
“To achieve this, many experts have proposed that there is a need for the scrapping of the state independent electoral commission.
“Their functions and powers should be transferred to the independent national electoral commission because the state independent electoral commission remains an appendage to every incumbent governor.
“This is perceived as the root cause of the problem of local government administration in Nigeria,” Fagbemi said.