While the provisions and powers of the Local Government Areas are explicitly stated in the constitution, it is not news that many States within Nigeria have usurped the powers of the local councils thereby reducing them to just a near redundant component of government with limited powers and effective authority, and in many cases duplicated and contradictory powers and roles with the States.
Local Government as the third tier of government and the closest to the people is expected by law to be able to articulate and respond to the common interest of the communities in the area in which they govern; build and maintain ties withcommunity, local and traditional associations within the local area; and administer the area in such a manner as to foster understanding, peace and progress of the residents who live within or transact commercial activities. Within the context of the constitution, issues of primary education, primary health care delivery, markets, registration of births and deaths, among others fall within the jurisdiction of the local government.
However, these roles have not been performed optimally by the councils for a myriad of factors such as poor funding, unskilled staff, and the emasculation by state governments. The current global pandemic of COVID-19 has considerably slowed down or halted many human activities and has placed huge burden on the health, economic and social fabric of every nation it has affected. These has forced governments to re-design their health sector response plan, cut-down or reallocate budget line items, alter socio-economic plans; and all these along with implementation of public health measures including partial or total lockdown and the enforcement of punitive sanctions.
In Nigeria, we have witnessed government combat the pandemic in various forms, through the setting up of testing centres, treatment and isolation centres, sharing of palliatives, total and partial lockdown of the States, restriction on movement, and ban on interstate travels.
In all of these approaches, gaps have also been identified, chiefly because the federal and the State governments have not deemed it expedient to involve the local government authorities who are the closest to the people. Prior to person-to-person spread in many communities, the local government ought to have played a more central role in sensitizing and informing the people of what the virus was about, what communities need to do to keep themselves safe, identifying early warning signs and setting up reporting channels.
The sharing of palliatives again exposed deep flaws in coordination and with respect to equity sharing and distribution.From observation, these exercises were carried out by personnel of the State Government and Presidential taskforce group with little participation of the Local government administration and their staff; and these personnel report back to the State or their superiors and in many cases, it is a case of just ticking the box rather than meeting the real needs of the most impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. What would have been expected is a case where the identification and selection of beneficiaries, and the actual distribution of the palliatives is undertaken by local government administration personnel, under strict oversight of the state government.
Primary health care centres across many parts of the country are in a dilapidated and dysfunctional state, with many lacking access to water, sanitation and hygiene facilities (WASH). According to WaterAid Nigeria 95% of primary healthcare facilities in Nigeria do not have access to WASH services (https://bit.ly/3e4QplN). In a study conducted by Heinrich Boell Foundation, it was revealed that many PHCs in Nigeria do not have access to energy forcing many to stop operations by 5pm (https://ng.boell.org/sites/default/files/solar_for_phcs.pdf)
The 2017 Health Care Access and Quality Index ranks the country at 140th position out of 195 countries assessed. In a 2018 report, the World Health Organization (WHO) ranked Nigeria’s heath care system at 187th out of 190. These indexes measured the accessibility of health care across countries from 1990 to 2015. It focused on the number of deaths from 32 causes that could have been prevented by ‘timely and effective medical care’.
Primary healthcare is the foundation of any effective, efficient, qualitative, and accessible healthcare delivery system, and it isone of the core mandates of the local government authority in Nigeria. These local governments, well before the COVID-19pandemic had their challenges, and as the first responders in the healthcare delivery system and with any health emergency, the dilapidated conditions of PHC signals a huge problem for the secondary and tertiary healthcare delivery systems in Nigeria, placing a disproportionately huge burden of care and responsibility on the few available health workers in our secondary and tertiary healthcare facilities.
With respect to education, and since the order on lockdown, all tiers of education have been forced to shut down. Primary school pupils have unfortunately stopped learning as many children who attend public primary schools do not have access to virtual learning platforms. For a country with over 13 million out-of-school children, COVID-19 has further worsened our situation.
Many residents live and work within the local government areas and a large majority of them are within the informal sector; the lockdown has caused severe hardship for the people and their sources of livelihoods, and yet, many have never been reached with any form of palliative or business support stimulus and are also excluded from the federal government, CBN 50 billion Naira COVID-19 Targeted Credit Facility [TCF] which mandates businesses to show/prove that their business have been severely impacted as a primary condition for access. In a country where over 60% of the workforce operate within the informal economy, government should also be interested in offering financial stimulus to these categories of people who do business (es) within the local government and also pay taxes[and other levies and revenue] to the LG. Given that the local government authority knows how to reach these businesses, and knows where they operate their business from as many of the businesses are registered with them; the LG councils would have been a strategic partner in the design and implementation of specially crafted targeted stimulus packages to these categoriesof businesses.
This report is an abridged outcome of a webinar organized By Hipcity Innovation Centre And The Heinrich Boell Foundation on the theme of Rethinking Local Governance.
