Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State has said he would only support local government autonomy if states were constitutionally allowed to determine their number of local government areas.
He described the current arrangement, where 774 local government areas are stipulated in the constitution, as fraudulent.
Makinde stated this during a stakeholders’ engagement on the 2024 budget organised by the state Ministry of Budget and Planning, held at the University of Ibadan on Monday.
He stressed that he was not averse to local government autonomy, but not under the current constitutional arrangement.
The event saw Makinde explain what he described as creative ways to manage the state’s funds, especially seeing how the funds that accrue to the local government areas are being managed.
Makinde explained: “I have seen people ask where we get money in Oyo State. The local government chairmen are here. I analysed them.
“During the debate held ahead of the last election, I was asked if I were supporting local government autonomy and I said no.
“I am in full support of that tier of government, but what we have at this point is fraudulent. Why will you have 774 local government areas stipulated in the constitution of Nigeria? What is the point?
“I said I will support Local Government autonomy if you can allow Oyo State, for instance, to decide if it wants to have 80 local government areas. We’ll just be able to do it. I will support that fully, but not under this current arrangement.
“We are only talking about federal allocation; how about baking a bigger cake so that we can do more even at the level of government for our people?
“I said to them. Before now, you got about N7 billion from the federal allocation. If you remove first-line charges of about N5.3 billion, you may have about N1.6 billion or N1.7 billion. We then said, Let’s do a flat deduction of N10 million per council for security, which is N330 million.
“So you have N1.4 billion or N1.5 billion left. If I divide that into 33 Local Government Areas, that is between N20 million and N40 million to go to each council monthly.
“They said I handicapped them because that N30 million or N40 million does not come to them. In our wisdom, we said that when we have serious issues in local councils, how do we tackle them? As we were having that discussion, Akesan Market got burned, and we needed about N800 million to rebuild it.
“If I were to give local government areas N40 million without doing anything per month, they would use half of our tenure to raise the money for rebuilding Akesan Market. But, because we were creative, we said, It is still your money, and you are the one to spend it, but I gave space for contingency projects.”
Addressing the concerns of stakeholders at the meeting on the infrastructure deficit, Makinde said he had directed that 100 kilometres of inner city roads in Ibadan must be reconstructed.
He said many inner roads in the state had gone bad because many of them had outlived their projected span.
This is because, as he said, a lot of money and time was needed to fix the Olowo bridge, but he assured us that it would be done.
On the school infrastructure deficit, Makinde said the state would need N12 billion a year.
He said the state was thinking outside the box to raise funds outside of UBEC, SUBEB, and the budget.
He added that the state would soon give a deadline to clear shanties and kiosks around school areas.
Also on education, Makinde promised to begin the process of employing additional teachers in primary schools this quarter.
On Primary Health Care (PHC) centres, Makinde promised that PHCs across the 351 wards of the state would be fixed over the next year.
Speaking further, Makinde gave evidence that the roads his administration embarked on were linking all five zones of the State.
He added that his administration was poised to hit 80 per cent in terms of budget performance this year.
Earlier, the state Commissioner for Budget and Planning, Professor Musbau Babatunde, declared that the state had so far achieved 75 per cent budget performance, promising that the Makinde government will continue to embark on people-driven projects.
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