SAN FRANCISCO, June 19, (THEWILL) – The Deputy President of the Senate, Chief Ike Ekweremadu, on Monday declared that the functions of the Federal Government as presently constituted is too big and should be adjusted.
This was as he pointed out that the present structure of Nigeria’s federal government is difficult to operate.
Addressing newsmen in Abuja, he noted that whereas the Federal Government is over burdened with responsibilities,
states have little roles to carry out.
He maintained that local governments should also be given some level of autonomy so that they too could perform their functions.
“We believe that the Federal Government as presently constituted is too big and we need to adjust it.
“In a situation where you have in the concurrent list only about 16 items, most of the other things are in the exclusive list.
“It doesn’t make sense, so we need to find a way of trimming the Federal Government to the benefit of the component states.
“So that some of these issues don’t become federal issues and that is the idea of federalism.
“We are looking at that, things like arbitration, agriculture, environment and such issues. Some of these things should go to the concurrent list and even the Police,” he said.
The Deputy Senate President further stated that the solution to Nigeria’s security situation lies in the decentralisation of the Police and allowing state governments to have their police.
He pointed out that each state has a specific kind of security challenges bedevilling it hence requires a peculiar kind of policing.
Reacting to fears of governors hijacking the police in their states, he advocated the setting up of a commission to oversee the state police just like the National Judicial Council, NJC, oversees the judiciary.
His words, “We cannot decentralise the police now because some people are still opposed to it.
“But I think it is beginning to make sense that you cannot be able to deal with our security situation in Nigeria except we change our security architecture.
“There is no place in this world where a federal system has a unitary type of policing which we have now.
“This is why we will continue to get it wrong in solving our security problems.
“It is not going to work until we change the architecture of our policing: a federal state as big as Nigeria must have to adopt a decentralised police.
“But we need to first take Nigerians to the level where they will understand this,” he said.
Ekweremadu explained that the reason for scrapping local governments’ account and merging it with state governments was that the states could contribute some money to what the local governments receive from federation accounts.
According to him, “We need to create some level of independence for the local governments, especially in the area of funding.
“We can look at section 162 of the constitution where the issue of withdrawing the local government account was created.
“So I believe that if that is abrogated, local government can now get their funds directly. It is not as if we are trying to create something new.
“I was a Local Government Chairman in 1997 and we were getting our funds directly from the Federal Government.
“So, we want to give the local government that level of autonomy so that they are able to perform their constitutional responsibilities.”
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