Anambra State governor, Chukwuma Soludo, has kicked against granting autonomy to local government councils in Nigeria.
He said any form of autonomy for local government areas in the country is against the tenets of true federalism.
Mr Soludo stated this at The Platform Nigeria, a programme organised by a Lagos-based church, Covenant Nation, to mark 2024 Democracy Day.
He said: “Funny enough, more recently, some people are arguing for the autonomy of local governments, including some APC persons, which would take Nigeria back many decades from what a true federation is about.
“There is no federal system in the world where you have three federal units. The counties in America where we copied [democracy], or there local governments, don’t go to the centre to collect money directly.
“Each state must have a power to design the kind of local government system that they want. That is what true federalism is about.”
Mr Soludo also said some responsibilities in the Exclusive List should be dropped by the federal government to sub-nationals.
“We need to tinker with the fiscal powers of the federal and state governments, devolve much of the responsibilities under the Exclusive List to the states, and at about 60 to 65 percent of the revenues to the states, with each deciding on the local system to adopt.
The former Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, proposed a single-parliament National Assembly in the face of dwindling costs.
“Sometimes, these conversations about single term might begin to make some sense so that you fix it, whether you say four years or five years, six years, seven years, single term.
“So, you are not thinking about the next election once you finish getting into this. I face that all the day in my state. You want to get into this (project), they say, ‘No, wait, you know you have an election’. And I say, ‘No, let’s get it, if we get there, we get there and if we lose, we lose,” Mr Soludo added.
“Why not consolidate the National Assembly into one with no more than five representatives per state? We don’t need a national assembly costing over N300bn yearly to maintain. We don’t need it,” he said.
