Douye Diri on LG Autonomy: We do not tamper with Allocations to Local Government Areas

As a government, while we have received the decision of the Supreme Court on the financial autonomy of the Local Government Councils, it must be noted that my administration has been practising the autonomy in principle because we do not tamper with the allocations to the Local Government Areas.

Rather, the State Government augments the allocation in a number of the LGAs where they are not able to pay salaries to their workers.

Our reforms in the LGAs have largely sanitized the system to the extent that Local Government Chairmen not only conveniently meet their financial obligations to the workers, but now carry out projects and still have some savings at the end of each month.

In truth, Bayelsa State has not been fairly treated in the creation of Local Government Areas to the extent that today, we still have just 8 local government areas as opposed to some other states with 44 and 40 local government areas. That to us is a clear injustice!

And our position from the beginning of this discuss has been that, states should take charge of the number of local governments they can create and cater for.

You don’t create local governments and take resources from one state to cater for the local governments in another state. That is robbing Peter to pay Paul!

As governor of Bayelsa State, we demand urgent actions to correct this imbalance. Our position is that Bayelsa deserves not less than 30 Local Government Areas.