Opinion
By Professor Akinyemi Onigbinde
IT is sheer illiteracy in the understanding of what federalism, as a system of state organization, is all about. In a federal state arrangement, states or regions or provinces are federating units, and no where, where federalism is a structural political doctrine, are local governments written into a federal Republican constitution, to the extent of being part of revenue-sharing arrangement or formula.
Point is, local government authorities exist at the convenience of the regions,province or state in which they are domiciled, and the number that should be, if necessary, is determined by such federating units.
A government at the centre of a federation have no business creating local governments,as successive military administrations of a section of our polity have done, talk less of canvassing for some autonomy for such illegality and abnormality. If such request of autonomy must come into place, then let us have fiscal autonomy, to the extent that each and every state will source the funding of its operations, and cease being bottle-fed from oil wells of the South-South region, a geopolitical zone of a skewed federation that has less local government areas to benefit from a feeding bottle federalism that we run.
To that extent, state assemblies, under the instigation of their governors, must continue to resist a spurious autonomy to an illegal creation called local government areas, which is no more than a direct route by the Northern oligarchs to seize rural lands in the direct control of local government authorities who, definitely, would lack the capacity to fight the central authority over withheld allocations.
Enough of the continued bastardization of a federal arrangement in need of an urgent restructuring for a wholesome polity.
***Professor Akinyemi Onigbinde is the executive secretary, Centre for Development & Policy Studiee,Ilepa, Ifo, Ogun State.
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