The Association of Local Governments of Nigeria (ALGON) on Thursday advocated true autonomy for Local Governments(LGs), saying it will help in managing and solving security challenges facing the country.
Ibrahim Dasuki, former ALGON President and member of Board of Trustees (BOT) said this at a news conference, organised shortly after an emergency meeting of the Executive Council, Board of Trustees (BOT) and past Presidents of ALGON in Abuja.
Dasuki said the local governments and traditional institutions have a key role to play in security matters as the security challenges mostly happened at local government levels.
“If you look at the security challenges we are facing in Nigeria, virtually in every zone are local in nature, it does not happen in the city, be it insurgency, banditry and others are mostly happened at local government levels.
“Why is it so, it is because of the failure of the local government system. If you could look back to the history, our local governments played key roles in ensuring peace and security especially the responsibilities given to traditional institutions.
“Over times, there were reforms, especially in 1976. In the north, we had a native authority, and Emir was a leader then. Whoever comes to town and city, he must be registered, he must be known.”
Dasuki recalled that due to the reforms, the government splitted the native authority with the emirate system.
He said this created a vacuum in terms of checkmating who goes in and out, resulting to missing link in the operation of local governments.
According to him, unless and until we go back and look at the older system, the security challenges bedeviling the country will be found difficult to address.
“You can deploy number of security personnel, and use whatever weapons, but so long as you don’t have structure, you can have some achievements in the short term but it cannot be sustained, you will see reemergence again.
“I will like to call on the government to look at the local government’s role in security matters.
“It is imperative because despite the fact that there is security committee comprising all the security agencies, we have to incorporate traditional institutions to the system so that they play a key role in solving security challenges.”
He also commended the Supreme Court judgment on LGs financial autonomy currently implemented by the administration of President Bola Tinubu.
