Posted by By Emmanuel Ulayi on
ABUJA - THE Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has denounced as a pill too bitter to swallow, Federal Government's deal with Cameroun to cede the Bakassi Peninsula to Yaounde. President of the NLC, Mr. Adams Oshiomhole, told members of the National Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE) in Abuja at a seminar that.....
ABUJA - THE Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) has denounced as a pill too bitter to swallow, Federal Government's deal with Cameroun to cede the Bakassi Peninsula to Yaounde. President of the NLC, Mr. Adams Oshiomhole, told members of the National Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE) in Abuja at a seminar that the measures adopted by the Federal Ggovernment in its deal with Cameroun were faulty.
Oshiomhole whose address was delivered by an Assistant Secretary of the Congress, Mr. Joel Ojigi, said government must be ready to deal decisively with all issues arising from the decision as regards full resettlement of the inhabitants.
He said rather than adopting legal options, government should have subjected the issue to a referendum to determine what the choice of the people is.
President-General of NULGE, Mr. Kingsley Ogbah, in his address of welcome asked the National Assembly to revisit the discarded Constitution Amendment Bill which he said contained other provisions beneficial to the country.
One of such, according to him, is the provision granting autonomy to the local governments as the third tier of government.
Underlining the need for the autonomy, the labour leader argued that the councils as the bastion of democracy and good governance could hardly perform those roles because of the excessive suffocation under the yoke of the state governments.
'In fact, in some of the states, only a quarter of the council funds from the federation account gets to them because of the Joint Account system, and the situation is not likely to change unless and until the provisions of the 1999 constitution as it affects the local government are amended," he said.