In this interview with PREMIUM TIMES, Kehinde Bamigbetan, veteran journalist, former chief press secretary to the Lagos state Governor and current Chairman of Ejigbo local council in Lagos, talks about his life as a journalist, the challenges in his council, and his plans at the expiration of his term.

He describes his recent ordeal in the hands of kidnappers as “a nightmarish experience. I’m still trying to heal myself and would rather not discuss it.”

You are in the second year of your second term in office, when you look at what you have done, do you think you could have done more?

Bamigebetan: If you look at what it took for us to get this far, you will realize that we have actually overstretched ourselves. The four roads that we are building right now, for example, we had to get a loan to do them, and for us to get the loan, it took us over a whole year for negotiations. That means of course that money is an issue here. We would love to do so many things, we have so many plans. We have around 36 roads that are priority that we believe needs to be done. But you can see that so far now we have taken only about five of the roads as a local government. So in terms of resource availability, we don’t have enough. If we have more than this, I’m quite sure that we could do much much better than what we are doing, and that’s basically why we are trying to now encourage the residents to pay what they ought to pay to the council. There are laws that say you need to pay a Development Levy if you are above 18. If you are running a canteen you need to pay food and premises levy, if you are running a bar, you need to pay for your licence, all these have been neglected over the years, and now we are going house to house talking to people of the importance of…. If you don’t pay how do you want the local government to be able to provide services to you? Because, note also that the local government does not have direct access to federal funding, it is an LCDA that relies on subvention from the Oshodi-Isolo local government. So that in effect means that our money cannot be as much as Oshodi local government. That is why I say that many Lagosians who are bothered about performance of local governments should actually support us by insisting that we should be given LGA status, so that we can have direct access to federal funding. That would dramatically improve our capacity to deliver on many of the complaints that they are having against the local government system. So I think that if I had more resources, I will definitely be able to do more than this because we are not talking of lack of ideas now, or lack of plans but the money to make those plans a reality.

You’ve talked about the issue of taxes and development levies, and residents have always complained of multiple and over taxation. How have you been able to address this issue?

Bamigbetan: Many of them have not bothered to look at what the law says. The government operates at three tiers…because before the taxes were designed, there was a national constitutional conference where they called all of us, everybody came together and said “how do we fund our local government system?” Our people must pay so-so number of taxes. How do we fund our state government? So it has been agreed and it is what is in the constitution that is being implemented. So what they call multiple taxation, somebody has said that once he has paid his tax to the state, he will not pay to the local government…

The same tax?

Source
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Government impunity and torture of its citizen through illegal taxation.