We Practise LGA Autonomy In Bayelsa, Deserve Not Less Than 30 Councils –Douye Diri

By Daniel Dafe

Following the decision of the Supreme Court on the financial autonomy of the Local Government Councils, Governor Douye Diri of Bayelsa State has said that his administration has been practising the autonomy in principle because the allocations to the Local Government Areas are not tampered with.

He said this on Friday in a post on X.

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

Continuing, he said: “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.”

Meanwhile, Diri said: “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!”

ALSO READ: Meta To Appeal $220 Million Fine By FCCPC, Says WhatsApp

Adding: “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!”

He continued: “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.”