UNDP seeks autonomy for councils, review of constitution

From Abosede Musari, Abuja

THE United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has recommended improved local government autonomy and constitutional review that will allow for full decentralisation of function and fiscal responsibility from state governments.
It said the proposal was aimed at making the local authorities more capable of delivering on their mandates to the grassroots people.
The recommendation was made at the end of a two-day workshop recently held in Lagos by the UNDP in collaboration with UN Habitat and the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

The workshop titled "Stakeholders' Validation Workshop on Consolidated Report of Assessment of Good Urban Governance in Nigeria," drew participants from state and local governments in Nigeria as well as from Liberia.

The workshop was part of the UNDP programme on Good Urban Governance (GUG) in Nigeria and has been running for two years.

At the validation workshop, a survey which  revealed situations in local government administration as regards the efficiency of local governments which  fall within major cities in Nigeria was presented. The survey showed the involvement of the people in decision making and other issues such as security, gender and access to land and shelter were examined in the survey.

According to a UNDP official, Matthew Alao, the GUG programme was initiated to study the activities of local governments which fell within the major cities in Nigeria and see how their varying commitment to service delivery had contributed to fragmenting the cities.

The project, he said, was also to push an agenda for the establishment of a central authority that will provide and manage common services such as water and sanitation for the major cities in order to promote even development while the different local governments could perform their other statutory roles.

"In Nigeria we don't have management of cities because most of our cities have been fragmented into local government areas. Not less than 10 local governments are managing the city of Ibadan alone which is against the practice that existed before the 1976 local government reforms. One of the overall objectives is to cause legislative reforms in the management of our cities", he said.

He added that in cities such as Port-Harcourt and Owerri, the government had started test running the idea of having a single authority manage the cities, which was working.

Assistant Director, Household Surveys at the National Bureau of Statistics, Mr. Isiaka Olarewaju, who presented the baseline survey showed that there were some disparity in the management of cities which were handled by different local governments, thereby underscoring the need to have a single body managing cities in Nigeria.
 Source: The Guardian