A politician and community leader in Ikeja local government area, Comrade Deji Adebayo, has argued for local council development areas to be sustained across the state.
The Lagos House of Assembly recently held public hearings on a bill to amend the state’s Local Government Administration law.
The amendment became pertinent after the Supreme Court ruled that local governments in Nigeria are entitled to financial autonomy.
Before the ruling, state governments acted as middlemen between local government and federal allocations.
Such an affordance allowed the Lagos state government to have some control over local government funding.
However, now that federal allocations are expected to directly flow to local governments, LCDAs may become sidelined as they are not recognised by the Nigerian constitution, only by the state in which they were created.
According to the Speaker of the Lagos House of Assembly, Mudashiru Obasa, the 37 LCDAs in Lagos will now sit under the 20 local governments recognised by the federal constitution, as part of efforts to keep them in operation pending when they are recognised at the federal level.
Speaking to Ikeja Record recently, Mr. Adebayo appeared to support the House’s move, as he outlined the importance of LCDAs in Lagos.
According to Mr. Adebayo, LCDAs make it easier for the dividends of democracy to reach the smallest unit of society.
“The very street where I stay here in Ikeja local government area would not have been remembered for the next 20 years or thereabouts if we were still administered under Ikeja local government,” Mr. Adebayo, whose community is under Ojodu LCDA, said.
“Everything we needed to do including indigent registration, certificate collection, or registration for anything, whether the Nigerian army, the Nigerian police force, or whatever that requires us to get to the government from my street here, you would have to go to Ikeja local government.
“And as of today, due to the economic crisis that we have in this country, it would take you about a sum of N2,000 to N3,000 to move from my own area to Ikeja local government to process anything.
“That’s the cost of transportation alone. And that is too much. That’s to tell you the distance to the Ikeja local government territory.
“And Ikeja is one of the smallest local government areas in terms of landmass in Lagos state. If we talk of Alimosho local government, if we talk of Ikorodu, Epe, Badagry, these are big, chunky local government areas that have a very huge landmass. It’s very difficult for just one office to administer such landmass based on the reality of the population.”
