TheCable

Ita Enang, senior special assistant to the president on Niger Delta affairs, says the failure of governors to release funds to local governments is the cause of security challenges in the country.

He said this while speaking on Good Morning Nigeria, a programme on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), on Monday.

According to him, the efforts of President Muhammadu Buhari to tackle insecurity have been frustrated by governors, who are spending funds that should be allocated to their local governments.

He added that if the governors allocate the necessary funds and internally generated revenue to their respective local governments — thereby reaching the people at the grassroots — there will be peace in the country.

“The governors have exercised so much powers that are beyond what the constitution envisaged for them — beyond what the law gave to them. The president has kept within his powers as president and does not interfere with the funds of the state governments. The governors have interfered and kidnapped the funds of the local governments through what is called the state/local government joint account,” he said.

“They don’t even give to the local governments the monies that they realise as internally generated revenue, which is why the joint account was made — internally generated revenue plus the statutory allocation, you add it and distribute to the local governments.

“Now, the insecurity problem we have today, the governors cannot escape the criticism of the people because everybody is a witness. If the governors allow the monies of the local governments to get to the local governments, the local governments would have been able to at least capture within their net, certain persons of certain class at that local government level. They will be seen as a tier of government.

“If the governors had given the monies meant for local governments, there would be agriculture at that level; there would be some intervention in infrastructure at that level; there would be governance at that level. What happens today is that chairmen of local governments and local government officers only go to work when there is allocation.

“If governors would take the monies of local governments, and when they face insecurity, they say ‘President Buhari’. Then-President Buhari will be applying the federal government allocation to fund the armed forces — the security agencies going to every spot to intervene.

“Meanwhile, each of these spots belongs to a local government, or a state, and the states will believe that they can deal with local governments the way they are dealing with them, and then have peace? You cannot have peace.”