I have in the past argued on the importance of local governments in the process of service delivery for any country and that global trends today seem to be for empowering and giving local governments more responsibilities and the requisite resources necessary for efficient and effective service delivery. I wish to add slightly to those arguments and explore further why I am convinced that local governments are not just necessary but deserve to be given more powers, autonomy, and general authority to manage the affairs of the localities with more purpose and independence. Over the last few years we have seen developments that suggests that our government is slowly curtailing and reducing the functions of local governments through a process of re-centralisation of functions like water provision; local policing, some aspects of primary education responsibilities and the transfer of health services to the central government.
I wish to repeat what I said in the past that the global trend today amongst countries in all continents, major development and financial institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Bank, Commonwealth Association and indeed academic researchers in the area of local government, all points to one direction. The need to decentralise more and let local governments have more powers, authority and resources to become service delivery points of note and relieve central governments of provision of basic services whose point of access to citizens is believed to be better provided by local governments.
This is a trend that calls for central governments to release the strangle on local governments by not only giving them more powers and authority but by ensuring that the budgetary and planning processes at local government do reflect the control and ownership by these entities, especially with respect to their capacity to generate revenues to sustain their development expenditures. This will include the authority to impose taxes that are not only fair and neutral in the context of local governments, but taxes whose accrued revenues will balance the fiscal needs of the local governments and the importance of them politically accounting for their tax regimes.
To date, it is generally agreed and accepted that local entities are the best placed to ensure and promote levels of subsidiarity and the promotion of local good governance as separate from national good governance. Whilst it is appreciated that local good governance necessarily ought to feed the practices at national level, it is however important that the localness be self-defined and entrenched to depict a truly local bred product and outcomes.
The need to enhance this approach rests on a government’s ability to firstly accept that decentralization is not only about providing functional and roles dispersals to localities, but more importantly creating an environment where local governments become sources of sustainable socio-economic and political development whose context is a well-resourced and financially stable local entities. This will create an environment within which local governments can begin to have more opportunities for raising their own revenues through investing in avenues where they can reap the possible high returns as the market may offer.
Our local governments have not only been stripped of functions and powers but opportunities for initiatives such as investment or venturing into hitherto unconventional revenue raising efforts. Our local governments still rely on government grants for as high as 80% or more for both their development and recurrent budget needs. The new Local Government Act of 2012 has, apart from consolidating the old Acts on local governments, cosmetically created an opportunity for local governments to engage in more economic activities that will raise revenues for them. This is however envisaged under an environment which, in my view, is still hostile to a more effective and necessary decentralisation. The type of decentralisation that creates financial stability and opening of more revenue raising opportunities for local governments and a general autonomy that creates a meaningful resource sharing between central government and local governments.
This resource sharing will include increasing the benefits from revenues raised on their localities in the exploration and utilisation of natural resources such as minerals, wild life, tourism and other avenues. Our local governments require a deliberate move from central government re-assess the decentralisation strategies and redefine the focus of such to re-empower and recognise these entities as primary vehicles for sustained local economic development. This will in the long run create economic opportunities for locals to create their own empowerment strategies and loosen the current heavy dependence of local development on the national economic factors.
It might as well be time to redefine our development focus and start from the local economies, for a long time we have always maintained a national based economic development process and the impetus that is associated with that approach seems to have reached its apex and we need to assess other approaches to leverage the development process beyond the current. I am still convinced that decentralisation of more devolved powers and authority matched by a sustainable resource base can provide additional impetus to our development initiatives.
Our local governments must graduate from central government dependency they currently are to institutions of real [potential for leveraging the development process. There is need to assess where the recent re-centralisation has taken us as a country and be open and honest about what exactly we want our local governments to bring to the table as agents and engines of a more balanced and sustainable development process that is anchored on a robust local economy. I am aware that this requires a total shift in the mind set of our approach to development policies ‘initiatives and possibly redefining our rural/local development programmes, which in some instances may lead to aligning our priorities and development goals and objectives. A thorough analysis of these aspects should give us pointers as to where we could channel our focus.
The world has undergone and seen tremendous processes of decentralisation in all the continents and if we need any bench marking, the experiences must be plentiful. However those will only serve to provide the conceptual and theoretical base for the approach, I am again convinced that the contextual and relevant aspects are inherently inward and we as a nation possess such to define our path. We can redefine our new and more focused decentralisation processes to create more relevance and engineer productive local governments.
