International Journal of Innovative Research and Development

Abstract

Finance is essential to the Local government to enable it construct, establish and maintain social services and rural infrastructure at the grass ischolar_main level, which is their statutory responsibility. The Nigerian constitution provided for funding of Local Government from three main sources: Allocation from the Federal Account, the 10% proportion of the monthly state Government internally generated revenue and the internally Generated revenue of the Local Government, yet the Local Governments continue to record setbacks towards the development of the grassischolar_mains. There have been allegations of state governments meddling with local government funds thereby undermining their financial autonomy. The study therefore examined the operations if the State-Local government Joint allocation committee and financial autonomy in Ogun State, Nigeria, one of the 36 states in the country. As in most of the other states in the federation, there was evidence of undue access and deduction from the Joint account by the state government. The state government equally utilized the opportunity of the joint account to utilize some of the funds for the account for its purposes. The membership of the committee is lopsided, such that the many observers make no contributions to the sharing of the resources which are pre-determined before the convening of such meetings. It is believed that for effective financial autonomy to be realized in the Local Governments, the 1999 constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria should be amended. The state-Local government joint allocation committee should be scrapped while funds from the federation account should be sent to the local governments directly.

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Abstract

Most developing countries have adopted decentralization since the last two decades of the twentieth century as a mechanism of bringing government closer to the people, ensuring greater government efficiency and making the government more inclusive. In spite of operating a federal system of government, Nigeria still manifests some high level of tendency towards centralization especially in some critical sectors. Politics in Nigeria is elitist and highly monetized, as such majority of the population, such as the poor, women and the young people seem to be excluded to a great extent in terms of political participation as well as policy formulation. The study examined decentralization and the inclusiveness of the different segments of the population in the governance of Ogun state, one of Nigeria’s 36 states, located in the South West geo-political zone of the country. The study adopted descriptive research design and utilized qualitative data. In-depth interview of the 68 respondents was used to gather data which was content analyzed. There is still tendency towards centralization with the sub-national governments depending on the central government in certain sectors. The state government made meaningful attempts to implement policies and programmes that served the interests of the poor, children, youth, women and the elderly. However, the level of women representation in electable public position was low falling below the United nations recommendation of 30% affirmative action on gender.

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