Politician and former Chairman, Ijebu East Local Government Council in Ogun State has said that the major bane of growth and development of local councils in Nigeria was the indiscriminate diversion of funds for their development to other coffers by the superintending state governments.
Speaking recently on a Splash FM Oju Abe programme, he cited the Ogun State example, where he said several years ago, life was good at the grassroots because the national cake was more fairly shared unlike what obtained now, despite that the Tinubu government had triply increased monthly allocations to all local councils in Nigeria.
“Sometime ago, everybody fed fairly despite that the allocation to local councils at that period were ten times less than what the councils get at the moment. At the period I was in office, every local government received not more than N200million monthly from Abuja but right now, it is about N600million. If that amount of money came directly to the bank accounts reachable by the local governments, how won’t people live good lives?”.
“In the petition I wrote to EFCC, I revealed that the LGs had accounts opened and operated by them but the state government opened separate accounts for all the twenty local government councils in the state into which LG funds are deposited and out of the reach of the councils, he said.
“All enquiries on the aforementioned should be directed to the Governor’s Office for clarity”, he added.
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