Nigeria’s 774 LGAs squandered N1.5 trillion allocation – Chidoka

Nigeria’s Minister of Aviation, Mr. Os­ita Chidoka, has described the local gov­ernment administration as a cesspit of corruption through which an estimat­ed N1.5 trillion of the na­tion’s statutory allocations are drained annually.

He said this phenomenon has left majority of citizens living at the grassroots in ab­ject poverty. Chidoka, who delivered the 44th Convocation Lec­ture at the University

of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN) on Thursday said the founda­tion and building blocks for a vibrant Nigerian economy and citizens was to be found in local councils but this has often been wasted under the Nigerian system.

He however, stunned the audience when he said there was the total absence of valid data capturing or storage of information for the public to access in any of the contemporary Information Communication and Technology (ICT) mediums in almost all of Nigeria’s 774 local gov­ernment councils.

In a paper entitled, “Re­building the Nigerian Dream: Mapping the Building Blocks”, the Nigerian Min­ister of Aviation said it was most shocking to discover that except for Yewa South Local Government in Ogun State, no other local govern­ment council in Nigeria has a functional website.

He described the absence of these websites as “the black hole” through which massive fraud is carried out in the country. According to him, about N1.5 trillion is mismanaged annually by lo­cal government councils in Nigeria.

“Looking at the amount devoted to ICT, a cursory web search for local govern­ments in Nigeria produced no results. In fact, the Yewa South Local Government in Ogun State is the only one that has a website and even that lacks quality informa­tion about the activities of that local council as neither its annual budget nor any of the services it provides are online,” said Chidoka.

“Managing a transparent public institution requires making information read­ily available. We met a black hole; that black hole can only be a cover for the misman­agement of over N1.5 trillion sent to local governments an­nually,” he lamented.

According to Chidoka, Ni­geria’s 774 local government councils are all well funded through statutory monthly al­locations from the federation account and even generate their own internal revenues.

He said it was important all tiers of government are brought together and infor­mation about them digitalised.

“The absence of records has made it difficult for Ni­geria to build social trust and modern infrastructure. We need to digitalise information and make records available to all citizens,” said Chidoka.

“Digitalising public re­cords will accelerate our eco­nomic growth and facilitate job creation. The proper col­lection and digitalising of records at the local government level will open up new avenues for generating revenues from taxes and will combat corruption,” he added.