Lagos assembly not scrapping LCDAs — Speaker

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.

The PUNCH reported 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 Local Government’s 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, on Monday, agreed to conduct another public hearing on the bill.

It also invited the state Attorney-General, Lawal Pedro, for an interpretation of the recent Supreme Court judgment on financial autonomy for local governments.

The resolutions came at a sitting presided over by Obasa on Monday.

Obasa said the review of the LG Administration law was not intended to scrap the LCDAs but to further strengthen them.

“I agree on the need for us to schedule a second allotted day for the public hearing,” the Speaker said while adding that he had been inundated with calls by people who wanted to know the fate of the LCDAs.

“We are not scrapping the LDCAs. Rather, what we are trying to do is to look at the recent Supreme Court judgement in terms of Lagos and local governments’ joint account and fashion out a way where the parent local governments and the LDCAs work together without the LDCAs being shortchanged,” he added.

The Speaker also agreed on the need to work on the formal listing of the LCDAs by the National Assembly.

“Kano has 44 local governments and out of Kano, Jigawa was created and has 27,” he said as he suggested 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, said many of the stakeholders invited to the event could not make it.

He attributed the poor attendance to the weather condition of the day, just as he prayed the House to 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 maybe the government is trying to wipe some people out of the local government system.”

He also called for a liaison and better collaboration with the National Assembly to make the upper legislature understand why the LDCAs should be listed as substantive local governments.

On his part, Desmond Elliot representing Surulere Constituency 1 noted that because of the size of Lagos in terms of population and its economic importance to Nigeria, it was imperative to work for 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.