A non-governmental organisation, Peasants Empowerment Concern Initiative, PECi, has charged Nigerians to wake up and recover their local government areas hijacked by state governors.
The group gave this charge to Nigerians on Sunday ahead of the first anniversary of financial autonomy granted to Local Government Areas, LGAs, by the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment of July 11, 2024.
PECi made the remark in a statement issued on its behalf by the former Director General of the Voice of Nigeria and a founding member of the All Progressives Congress, Osita Okechukwu.
He said: “Our dear Compatriots, four days to the first anniversary of financial autonomy granted to Local Government Areas (LGAs) by the Supreme Court’s landmark judgment of July 11, 2024, a Non-Governmental Organisation, PECi (Peasants Empowerment Concern Initiative), is alarmed that our countrymen are sleeping over our right.”
According to Okechukwu, the group regretted the utter contempt for this landmark judgment and lamented that Nigerians have regrettably and ignorantly refused to monitor the management of their local government funds as granted by the Supreme Court judgment.
PECi cited examples of the casualties suffered because of Nigerians’ laxity or sheer ignorance of holding their councillors accountable as demanded by the Supreme Court judgment, such as the absence of primary school pupils of the Federal Capital Territory from classes for months since the beginning of 2025, the Mokwa flood disaster, palpable insecurity at the LGAs, and dilapidated rural roads.
The group recounted that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, a former governor and witness to the financial repression at the grassroots level, consequent upon planlessness and squandermania, which made nonsense of the humongous revenues that accrued from the Federal Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC) to LGCs in 25 years of our 4th Republic, resorted to the Supreme Court to resolve the impasse.
PECi posited that the LGA is the foundation of our grassroots democracy and that corollary financial autonomy is the handgun for the expansion of its frontiers and improvement of the prosperity of peasant residents in our 8,809 wards, mostly located in rural communities nationwide.
