By Polycarp Onwubiko
A Committee Chairman on the housing program in the House of Representatives has promised to intervene in the housing deficit in Nigeria. The most frustrating issue in this country is that nationwide public opinions are not considered by the National Assembly.
The National Legislature has
demonstrated utter disregard and a lack of necessity to overturn the unitary
principles of the heterogeneous society like Nigeria and take steps to return
the country to the realistic principles of a federal system of government as
practiced in the First Republic.
The federal government should
have no business running many MDAs like housing schemes, agriculture, security,
commerce, healthcare delivery, education, and admission into tertiary
institutions.
These fall within the
constitutional responsibility of the respective subnational governments which
know how to run the MDAs in line with the values of their people. For instance,
the housing style preferred in the northern part of the country is not the same
as that in the southern part.
If President Tinubu does not want to devolve more powers to the subnational governments, at least let him kickstart a new Revenue Sharing Formula so that state governments will have over 70 percent of the monthly statutory allocations to be in a position to take care of the roads within their respective jurisdictions, given that road infrastructure is crucial to socioeconomic growth and development.
Time has conclusively proven
that it is a well-nigh impossible task for the federal government to
rehabilitate the so-called "Trunk A Roads" that traverse all the
states in the Federation. It does not matter what the federal government has in
the annual budgets for the roads; rather, what has been budgeted has been
frittered away due to systemic, pervasive corruption in the country.
It bears restating that until
the lopsided Federation is restructured, President Tinubu will be wasting his
time in the annual budgetary provision in the over bloated and overloaded
federal government MDAs. The report submitted by Stephen Oransaya for the
merging and/or scrapping of many MDAs has been gathering dust on the shelf
because corruption has been a stumbling block to sanitize the country through
restructuring and massive devolution of powers to the states and a drastic
review of the monthly statutory allocations.
It is the humongous statutory
allocations to the federal government that have led to massive corruption in
all the MDAs, while the delivery of services is nothing to write home about.
Polycarp Onwubiko, public
policy analyst.
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