Too much power, resources at the centre responsible for Nigeria’s under development – Ihedioha

Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Emeka Ihedioha yesterday said that the concentration of powers and resources at the centre was responsible for the country’s stunted growth and development.
Ihedioha, spoke during the visit of the Constitutional Implementation Committee of Kenya’s National Assembly, Kenya led by Hon. Njoroge Baiya.
He observed that Nigeria’s past and present constitutions allocated more resources to the central government, leaving the federating states to bleed.
Ihedioha, who is the chairman of the Ad hoc Committee on the review of the 1999 constitution however said that the imbalances necessitated the amendment of the constitution.
His words: “A perusal of the various constitutions of Nigeria since 1960 shows that the Exclusive List had constantly been increasing mainly as a result of military involvement in governance.
“Resources are concentrated at the centre, such that the Central Government takes more than Fifty (50)’percent of allocation from the federation account.
“This state of affairs has created challenges of development at the constituent units where there are noticeable paucity of resources.”
According to him, the need to give more powers to the States was also one of the reasons why certain items had been removed from the Exclusive list in the recent amendment to the 1999 constitution.
“Certain items have been moved from the Exclusive legislative list to the concurrent list such as Railways, Stamp duties, Pension, Road Safety, Youth, Environment, Arbitration, whereas certain matters that are residual in nature like Health and Housing have been moved to the concurrent list. The idea is to devolve more power to the constituent units of the Federation,” he said.