The Senate is set to foil the plot by the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) to scuttle the autonomy being proposed for local governments in the new constitution, a member of the Senate Committee on Constitution Review, Senator Smart Adeyemi, has said.

Briefing journalists in Abuja yesterday, Adeyemi (PDP, Kogi West) said the Senate would also halt the governors’ move for the scrapping of local governments, blaming the high poverty rate in the country on “the governors’ failure to provide succour to the people.”

He warned that expunging local governments from the constitution or reducing their powers would cause anarchy in no distant future.        

Adeyemi, who was reacting to the statements credited to the chairman of the governors’ forum and governor of Rivers State, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, that the forum would stop the third tier of government from being entrenched in the constitution, said: “We’ll do everything humanly possible to resist all attempts by the governors to stop the third tier of government from being entrenched in the constitution. We’ll do this in a way that it’ll be inexplicable in years to come for anybody to scrap local governments in Nigeria.”