Olorunnimbe Mamora, the ex-Minister of Health, expressed his view that governors played a role in the decline of Local Government (LG) administration in Nigeria by enforcing caretaker chairmen and obstructing the conduct of fair local government elections.
Mamora made this statement during an interview on Channels Television on Friday.
He said, ‘If I would be very frank, the governors destroyed the local governments. That’s the truth. Don’t forget, I was very much involved. Local government chairmen were elected under Abdulsalami Abubakar in 1998 with a three-year tenure which should have terminated in 2001.’
‘…but towards the end of the termination of the tenure, the local government chairmen under the aegis of ALGON started making moves to the National Assembly, then headed by Anyim Pius Anyim as Senate President and Ghali Na’aaba (of blessed memory) as the Speaker of the House.’
‘They (LG chairmen) were asking for the extension of their tenure to be four years in line with the state and the federal. That was the beginning.’
Mamore, who was the Chairman of the Conference of Speakers of State Houses of Assembly in 2001, said the move was challenged ‘because Section 7 of the Constitution has placed everything in the local governments under the state through laws made by the state house of assembly.’
‘We challenged it because it was like trying to usurp the powers of the state houses of assembly,’ he said.
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The Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly from June 1999 to June 2003 revealed that despite their objection, the National Assembly proceeded with the bill to establish four-year tenures for local government chairmen. In response, he and his fellow speakers at the time took the matter to court.
‘While the case was then in court because of the interest of the governors, they came in to join, and because they joined, the case was taken straight to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that the National Assembly had no business in determining the tenure.’
The ex-Senator for Lagos East Senatorial District from June 2003 to June 2003 said then President Olusegun Obasanjo ‘invited us speakers to the Villa and appealed to us because their tenure was about to end and new local government chairmen were yet to be elected.’
‘That was when he (Obasanjo) then persuaded us that each state should go and put in place a kind of stop-gap situation; that was what led to the state making laws for caretaker committees, which were supposed to be a temporary thing to take care of that lacuna, that is, the tenure of the local governments finishing and the new one yet to be elected.’
‘That is the genesis of caretaker committees, which the governors now abuse. You now see it all over the place; something which was supposed to be in the interim now contravenes Section 7 of the constitution that talks about democratically elected chairmen,’ he added.
The chieftain observed that local government elections are scarce, and even when held, opposition parties rarely prevail; instead, those linked to the governors and the ruling party tend to emerge as winners.
According to him, the caretaker model’s abuse gave rise to the problem of local government funds allegedly held by some governors.