The abuse of public office in Nigeria should not be allowed to fester. Any veil over acts of corruption does not serve this cause.
The unabashed stealing of funds belonging to local government areas by state governors was put on the front burner of national discourse by President Muhammadu Buhari recently, when he said that the criminal indulgence was responsible for the stunted growth of rural areas across the country. The heist is orchestrated through the unlawful manipulation of the monthly financial allocations to the councils from the Federation Account, paid into the special State-Local Government Joint Accounts. The president has not disclosed anything new. It has always been an open secret, and a persistent binge of corruption that has dogged governance in the states for too long.
The Senior Executive Course 44 graduands of the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS) had visited the President two weeks ago, as they rounded off their training. They presented him a report with the theme, “Strengthening Local Governance in Nigeria: Challenges, Options and Opportunities.” The NIPSS report to Buhari was timely, coming on the heels of a National Bureau of Statistics finding that says 133 million Nigerians are being savaged by multi-dimensional poverty.
Giving insight into how the theft is executed on the basis of intelligence at his disposal, the President said: “If the money from the Federation Account to the State is about N100 million, N50 million will be sent to the chairman but he will sign that he received N100 million. The chairman will pocket the balance and share it with whoever he wants to share it with.” As terrible as he saw the act as being, Buhari assured his NIPSS guests “that the report will be treated with the seriousness and urgency it deserves.” This sounds like being politically correct, with less than six months left to the completion of his tenure. It is quite incredible that the magic wand eluded him in the past seven years.
There are 774 Local Government Areas (LGAs) in the country, recognised by the 1999 Constitution, as amended. They are bound by Section 162(6) of this constitution, which stipulates that each state shall maintain a “State Joint Local Government Account” into which all allocations to local government councils from the Federation Account and from the Government of the State shall be paid; while subsection (5) makes it mandatory that amounts standing to the credit of the councils will be allocated to the States for the benefit of their local government councils.
These are chasms in the Constitution, which many governors exploit to amass illicit wealth. Regrettably, a governor is immune from prosecution while in office. But there is nothing in our law that prevents any investigation from being carried out in the event of an abuse of office. This is where the Buhari regime has failed abysmally. Even the local government chairmen he mentioned as accomplices in the looting, who do not enjoy any immunity, have never been brought to book. The loopholes in the anti-graft drive of the country have encouraged this impunity.
Under the current revenue sharing formula, the councils get 20.6 per cent of the nation’s generated resources. This is more than a fifth of Nigeria’s distributable income, which accrued to N25 trillion in the past 21 years, according to one media tally. In October, the LGAs received N177.086 billion from the Federal Accounts Allocation Committee, while they collected N1.667 trillion in 2019, before revenue generation began to drift south. Going by Buhari’s modelling of the theft, it will be foolhardy for anyone to expect development at the grassroots level.
Interestingly, most of the accused have maintained sealed lips, except the petulant retort of Governor Nyesom Nwike of Rivers State, who denied being among the cohort referred to by the President. He charged: “Mr. President, as a true leader, tell Nigerians those governors pilfering council funds.” Buhari must embrace the Wike challenge if he is honest with his pledge to the NIPSS visitors to implement their report on repositioning the councils. A few other governors made rebuttals through their media handlers, which, at best, are facile, given their principals’ rampart against the financial autonomy of local councils.
Whether in the urban or rural areas, the local government functions enshrined in the Fourth Schedule of the Constitution are observed in the breach. At this level, primary healthcare services are virtually non-existent. Primary schools are dilapidated, with the shortage of teachers to the point that one school in Amuzu ward, in Aboh Mbaise LGA in Imo State, with 300 pupils, has only four teachers, including the headmistress. Rural roads are not maintained, there are no public conveniences, the crisis of sewage and refuse disposal abounds, and insanitary slaughter houses constitute perennial public health concerns.
These dysfunctions in the governance of local councils are at the heart of the drive by many interest groups for their financial autonomy. Governors are however highly adamant in their opposition to the autonomy of councils and transparency in the management of their funds. The Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit had in May 2019 issued guidelines for the arrest of unwarranted cash withdrawals from the funds of local governments. In response, the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) took the Federal Government, NFIU and National Union of Local Government Employees to court. It wanted the court to declare NFIU’s action as unconstitutional. However, a Federal High Court in Abuja, early this year, dismissed the NGF’s suit. This puts the NFIU on terra firma to pursue its goals.
By challenging the NFIU action, governors had inadvertently proved Buhari right. Their eyes are perpetually on council funds, which explains why most of these LGAs are being run by members of Caretaker Committees appointed by the governors, instead of duly elected representatives, as stipulated in the Constitution. Devotees of pristine federalism may argue that only states constitute the federating units and not the councils. This is true. But nothing in the extant arrangement gives the governors the power or right to steal the funds of the third tier of government. The rot should be stopped. The easiest way to achieve this is by amending relevant sections of the Constitution.
The abuse of public office in Nigeria should not be allowed to fester. Any veil over acts of corruption does not serve this cause. Other African countries have done better in this regard. South Africa is presently discussing President Cyril Ramaphosa’s alleged $4 million corruption scandal; and the Court has returned his immediate predecessor, Jacob Zuma, to prison, after setting aside the parole verdict he got in September 2021, over acts of corruption in public office. But here, it is difficult to prosecute a local government chairman for a breach of public trust, let alone investigate a sitting governor; or prosecute him or a former president after they might have served out their tenures.
With Buhari’s labelling of the degree of theft of council funds by governors as terrible, it should have dawned on him by now that his state pardon of the only two former governors that his regime has been able to jail for stealing public funds, was a damning disservice to Nigeria’s anti-graft crusade. If funds for bringing governance closer to the people by providing social services that improve the standard of living are brazenly shared by a privileged few, thus worsening rural poverty, without consequences, then this democracy is a farce.
All politics, it is said, is local. If 133 million Nigerians are marooned in the valley of severe poverty, and are in rural areas that the councils embody, it means that the entire country is in a hellhole. A concerted emergency response by the Nigerian state is required; and it should begin with bringing councils treasury looters to account by every means possible.
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