Monday, May 23, 2011

UN Habitat survey rates local councils 'ineffective'

From Abosede Musari, Abuja

LOCAL councils in Nigeria have generally been ineffective in the delivery of services to citizens, according to a baseline survey recently conducted by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) through the UN Habitat in collaboration with the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).


UN Habitat survey rates local councils 'ineffective'

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The survey, which was presented to stakeholders during a two-day validation workshop in Lagos, highlighted some areas of inefficiency of the councils to include poor accountability and transparency, low involvement of the people in decision-making and poor provision of infrastructure.

It was carried out as part of measures to determine the level of Good Urban Governance (GUG) in Nigeria. Twenty-one local governments were studied in the survey in states harbouring cities such as Abuja, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Makurdi, Kaduna, Gombe, Owerri, Uyo, Akure and Onitsha among others.

The validation workshop was attended by several participants, including principal state and local governments officials from Imo, Lagos, Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Anambra, Gombe, Benue, Cross River, Taraba. Two commissioners also attended from Ondo and Taraba states.

The presentation of the survey was part of the GUG project of the UNDP, which began in Nigeria two years ago with the objective of improving governance at the local level.

Project Officer at UNDP, Matthew Alao, in an interview, told The Guardian that the project was conceived to ensure that Nigerian cities were managed in such a way as to encourage better service delivery to the people.

He explained that Nigerian cities like Lagos and Ibadan, among others, were usually managed by different local council authorities, thereby causing uneven service delivery and development.

According to Alao, it would be better to have only one authority managing the cities in order to speed up development.

He was of the view that when a city is managed by different local councils, some areas might enjoy essential services such as water provision, roads, refuse management and other common amenities more than the others, thereby causing disparity in the same city.

The UNDP official suggested that a single authority be created to manage the cities while local councils could still be responsible for smaller towns.

His words: "The Good Urban Governance project was conceptualised by UNDP, UN Habitat when the Oslo Governance Centre requested for proposal and the main objective is to improve governance at the local level, principally at the urban centres, and to ensure that there is a standard for healthy competition among the urban centres in Nigeria.

"In Nigeria we don't have management of cities because most of our cities have been fragmented into local government areas. Not less than 10 local governments are managing the city of Ibadan alone, which is against the practice that existed before the 1976 local government reforms. One of the overall objectives is to cause legislative reforms in the management of our cities."

At the opening ceremony of the workshop, Prof. Bade Falade of the UN Habitat stressed the need for Nigerian cities to be well planned to contribute to national growth.

Falade said: "We need to plan our cities because they are the engines that drive the national economy, not oil. It is good to derive revenue from oil but cities drive national economy. They create room for manufacturing industries and services. Lagos for example, has shown that if we fix our cities very well, they will contribute to the GDP of any nation."

According to Assistant Director, Household Surveys at the National Bureau of Statistics, Isiaka Olarewaju, who presented the baseline survey titled, "Consolidated Report of Assessment of Good Urban Governance in Nigeria," the survey showed some disparity in the management of cities, which were handled by different local councils, thereby underscoring the need to have a single body managing cities in Nigeria.

The data presented by him showed that in Ondo State for example, Akure township where two local councils were studied, Akure North and Akure South local councils, people only spend five minutes to access water in Akure North while a resident of Akure South spends 28 minutes.

The means that in Akure town, which is managed by the two local councils, one resident of the town gets water in five minutes while another resident of the same town spends as much as 28 minutes to get water.

This one no be new thing,  We already know our local councils are ineffective.