Ladi Adebutu Mulls Possible Way Out Of Nigeria's Woes

 

Hon. Ladi Adebutu 

ABEOKUTA  - A call has gone to the federal government to ensure local governments have the full autonomy for Nigeria to experience rapid development and progress it deserves. 

A former House of Representatives member, Hon. Ladi Adebutu gave the charge on Thursday at the Second edition of Ladi Adebutu Good Governance Symposium with the theme: Local Government Autonomy: a Panacea for National development in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.

Hon. Adebutu added that if the government at the grassroots fail, the whole government structure of any given country would failed. 

He maintained that, the problems of the country was self inflicted due to deliberate actions to render the local governments useless, stressing that successive governments have continue to steal the local governments fund by hijacking their revenues. 

His words: "When we fail at the grassroots, everything will fail. Nigeria's problems is self inflicted. We have deliberately all the local governments not to function by stealing their revenues.

"The problems we are having throughout the nation now it is self inflicted and it is not far from the fact that we have deliberately refused the local government to function and as we have refused the local government to function by stealing their revenues, rendering them incompetent and incapable to perform, agitations come from the grassroot.

"Bottom up and as this agitation come from the bottom up, like my brother said "they now bring the pipeline to access the influence of democracy" may God save us. 

"The only solution is to take away these elections from statutory bodies and allow credible elections to happen throughout the nation, so that we end up in a system where people can genuinely chose their leaders, genuinely have a means to exercise their franchise and in doing that in exercising their franchise, they have the legitimate means of going forward, and when legitimate means of going forward is refused then we have the situation where people do otherwise".

The Guest Speaker and a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, (SAN) Mike Ozekhome in his lecture, urged the federal government to restructure the country through referendum in order for the country to overcome its various challenges.

Ozekhome said that the central government must do something urgent with the current situation of the country, saying the country is heading to point of no return or no destination. 

The legal luminary said Nigerians must renegotiate the terms, if the country would continue to be united. 

He therefore, called for the abolition of the Nigerian constitution, stressing that, the National Assembly should be run on part time period.

"The situation where we have 360 House of Representatives, 109 Senators, we don't need them.  They are drainy our purse. The present system where 36 commissioners go to Abuja to go and share money is not going to work. 

"They go to Abuja to collect money and the state governors waylaid them and collect the money from them like bandits is not good. 

"Fund meant to develop local government are waylaid by state governors like bandits. Our constitution is federalism not unitary, it make Nigeria two tiers of government. 

"If we must stay together, we must renegotiate. If we give it one million amendments,  it will not solve our problems."

The Chairman of the occasion, Prof. Ayo Olukotun and the host, Hon. Ladi Adebutu in their remarks, called for local government autonomy, saying no true development would come the country's way unless the grassroots were developed.