The Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Mudashiru Obasa, clarified on Monday the controversy surrounding the fate of local council development areas in the state.
PUNCH reports last Thursday that the assembly was planning a bill aimed at replacing the existing 37 LCDAs in the state with Area Administrative Councils.
This was contained in a Bill for a Law to Provide for the Local Government System, Establishment and Administration, and to Consolidate All Laws on Local Government Administration and Connected Purposes, which went through a public hearing on Thursday.
However, the assembly agreed on Monday to conduct another public hearing on the bill.
The House also invited the Attorney-General of the State, Lawal Pedro, for an interpretation of the recent Supreme Court judgment on financial autonomy for local governments.
These resolutions came during a sitting presided over by Obasa.
Obasa stated that the review of the Local Government Administration law was not aimed at scrapping the LCDAs but at further strengthening them.
“I agree on the need for us to schedule a second allotted day for the public hearing,” the Speaker said, adding that he had been inundated with calls from people wanting to know the fate of the LCDAs.
“We are not scrapping the LCDAs. Rather, what we are trying to do is look at the recent Supreme Court judgment in terms of Lagos and local governments’ joint accounts and find a way for the parent local governments and the LCDAs to work together without the LCDAs being shortchanged,” he added.
The Speaker also acknowledged the need to work on the formal listing of the LCDAs by the National Assembly.
“Kano has 44 local governments, and from Kano, Jigawa was created and has 27,” he said, suggesting a review of the revenue-sharing formula by
the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission.
The Chairman of the Committee on Local Government, Sanni Okanlawon, while giving a report on the public hearing earlier conducted by the committee, stated that many of the stakeholders invited to the event could not attend.
He attributed the poor attendance to the weather conditions on the day and prayed that the House would approve a second allotted day for the exercise.
Supporting Okanlawon’s request, his colleague, Ladi Ajomale, said, “A lot of people are saying they do not understand what is going on and may believe the government is trying to wipe some people out of the local government system.”
He also called for better collaboration with the National Assembly to make the upper legislature understand why the LCDAs should be listed as substantive local governments.
On his part, Desmond Elliot, representing Surulere Constituency I, noted that because of Lagos’s size in terms of population and its economic importance to Nigeria, it was imperative to work towards the listing of the LCDAs.
“Anambra State has 21 local governments, and it is nowhere close to what Lagos has in terms of resources, economic importance, and dividends of democracy,” he said.