Benue APC, PDP Trade Words Over Rejection Of LG Autonomy

All Progressives Congress (APC) in Benue State has described the action by the state House of Assembly to vote against local government autonomy as “insensitive, callous, undemocratic and wicked.”

The party’s publicity secretary, Mr Daniel Ihomun, in a statement he issued yesterday in Makurdi, the state capital, accused the state government of deducting N49 million from the councils for each unit of the refurbished Hilux vans it donated to their chairmen recently.

Ihomun also alleged the deduction of N4 million per LG for the domestic security outfit amounting to N92 million per month.

He said for Assembly to vote against LG autonomy showed a total disconnect between the members and the people at the grassroots which they were elected to represent.

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According to him, “the State and Local governments Joint Account which was created to share Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) by the states on behalf of the councils had become the umbilical cord used by the state government for suckling LG allocations from the Federation Account.

In a swift reaction, the state chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) said it viewed as most unfortunate the statement credited to the APC in which it accused the Assembly and its Speaker, Hon Titus Uba, of scuttling the passage of the LG Autonomy Bill.

The PDP in a statement by its publicity secretary Bemgba Iortyom, said, “Out of  about 10 states that supported the bill on both occasions in 2018 and 2022, those controlled by the PDP were about half, including Benue, and with the bill needing only 24 states to pass it, it would have been successful if the 23 APC states had given their consent to it”

The PDP spokesperson said the APC’s diatribe is pathetically ineffective as a weapon against the weight of facts which place the blame squarely at its doorsteps for the failure of the Local Government Autonomy Bill.