TheCable

Olorunnimbe Mamora, a former minister of state for health, says state governors are largely responsible for the erosion of governance at the local level.

Speaking during a programme on Channels Television, on Friday, Mamora, a former speaker of the Lagos house of assembly, said he was “very much involved” in the events that led to the present state of the local government tier.

He said the caretaker committees, which have now almost replaced LG chairmen, were designed as a temporary measure to fill a transition gap.

The former minister said the genesis of the issue was in 1998, when local government chairmen elected under the military government of Abdulsalami Abubakar sought an extension of their three-year tenure to four years.

“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 terminate in 2001,” Mamora said.

“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.”

Mamora, who doubled as the chairman of the conference of speakers of state houses of assembly, said the move was challenged under his instance “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.

Mamora noted that the national assembly went ahead with the bill to make local government chairmen tenured for four years, while he and other state assembly speakers went to court, and the state governors later joined in.

“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,” he said.

Mamora said Olusegun Obasanjo, who was president then, waded in and invited the state assembly speakers to the villa and persuaded them to “put in place a kind of stop-gap situation”.

“That was what led to the state making laws for caretaker committees which was 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,” the former minister said.

“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.”

Mamora said elections now hardly take place in local governments and when they do, “governors’ linkmen” win the polls.

He added that if the autonomy of the local government is to be restored, “it should be put at the doorpost of the governors”.