Former Minister of Health, Olorunnimbe Mamora has said that governors destroyed the Local Government administration in Nigeria by imposing caretaker chairmen on the people at the grassroots.
Mamora stated this in an interview on Channels Television on Friday.
He said, “If I would be very frank, the governors destroyed the local governments. That’s the truth. Don’t forget, I was very much involved. Local government chairmen were elected under Abdulsalami Abubakar in 1998 with a three-year tenure which should have terminated in 2001;
“But towards the end of the termination of the tenure, the local government chairmen under the aegis of ALGON started making moves to the National Assembly, then headed by Anyim Pius Anyim as Senate President and Ghali Na’aaba (of blessed memory) as the Speaker of the House.
“They (LG chairmen) were asking for the extension of their tenure to be four years in line with the state and the federal. That was the beginning.”
Speaking further, Mamora, who was the chairman of the Conference of Speakers of State Houses of Assembly in 2001, said the move was challenged because Section 7 of the Constitution has placed everything in the local governments under the state through laws made by the state house of assembly.
“We challenged it because it was like trying to usurp the powers of the state houses of assembly,” he added.
The Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly between June 1999 and June 2003 said the National Assembly went ahead with the bill to make local government chairmen tenured for four years, and he and his then colleague-speakers went to court.
“While the case was then in court because of the interest of the governors, they came in to join, and because they joined, the case was taken straight to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court ruled that the National Assembly had no business in determining the tenure.”
“Then President Olusegun Obasanjo invited us speakers to the Villa and appealed to us because their tenure was about to end and new local government chairmen were yet to be elected,” he added.
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