The U.S embassy in Nigeria recently adverted the public to the alleged growing resource mismanagement by state governors citing various elephant projects from construction of sprawling state secretariat buildings to commercially questionable overhead bridges and less than viable airports across the states.
These fiscal dysfunction has remained unchecked because an average Nigerian evaluates governance from a unitary paradigm, the first person to blame for his poverty and hunger is the president and not his local government chairman or his governor.
The civil society organizations and those who could turn the narrative against the alleged sleaze being perpetrated at the subnational levels are caught in the sensational bubble of headlines and not people oriented advocacy accentuated in the chemistry of empathy.
Rather than looking at the U.S embassy’s intervention as a diplomatic overreach, it behoves the federal government and the President’s handlers to look inwards and see how the reforms so wonderfully enunciated at the center are being watered down at the states.
This is dangerously so because the governors seem not to realize that the ballooning state allocations at their disposals are a mere transfer of resources hitherto being enjoyed by Nigerians in the petrol and forex subsidies to the governments closest to them.
Whilst the states are constitutionally mandated to be over-sighted and held accountable by state houses of assembly, the later have failed woefully to carry out those oversight to an extent of being complicit in facilitating graft across the states.
Nigerians have lost count of the number of litigation being canvassed by SERAP most of which are aimed at enforcing good governance at the federal level, what about the states?
Perhaps for lack of visibility and the media headlines grab, most civil rights outfits do not consider calling out state governments a worthwhile effort which further pivoted the governors’ latitude to impoverish the masses within their jurisdiction.
The gratifying Local Governments Autonomy ruling by the Supreme Court which offered denouements in resource penetration to the grassroots is unfortunately and dangerously being muzzled across the states. Why the Finance minister and the Attorney General of the Federation have allowed this to fester is bewildering to say the least.
It is rather befuddling that the ubiquitous Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) has kept a muted silence since the U.S embassy’s uproarious revelation.
The NGF has simply given impetus to Samantha Power’s popular maxim which says ‘Silence in the face of atrocity is not neutrality but silence in the face of atrocity is acquiescence.’
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