stituted reforms that gradually
transferred local government authority from traditional rulers to elected representatives.
In the process, they created space for political participation for local elites, especially
western educated elite, who hitherto played little or no role in local governance. Their
model was the British local government system with its tiered structure and committee
system. The main incentives for the rapid transition to representative local government
were to prove to colonial authorities the readiness of Nigerian politicians to assume
higher political and administrative responsibilities and to enhance their own capacity to
mobilize the rural communities behind the struggle for national independence. This was
understandable as decentralization was a strategy of political mobilization in Africa
during the period of decolonization (Kasfir, 1983).

Compared to the colonial native authority system, the systems adopted in each of
Nigerias three regions made few concessions to traditional political and social structures
as the reformers were keen to rapidly modernize the system of government. The colonial
native authority system tried to fit local administration to the traditional political structure
subject to the overall direction and control of colonial administrators. Even though
colonial authorities often misperceived the essence of some traditional political systems
that they came across and thus designed inappropriate local administrative systems on
such misperception (Afigbo, 1972), generally they tried to maintain continuity of
traditional authority systems. The new leaders, on the other hand, were primarily
concerned with shifting development responsibility from traditional rulers who did not
share their vision of development and modernization to people who did.

These attempts to use alien models of organization to promote local development failed
for many reasons. First, local councilors failed to master and abide by the rules of
conduct required to efficiently run the new representative system. Bureaucratic rules
meant to enforce accountability and transparency were misinterpreted as attempts to
constrain the exercise of political authority newly won from the colonial regime. Second,
the representative local councils took a long time to gain legitimacy. Given the low level
of educational development at that time, the loyalty of the vast majority of the people was
to their traditional rulers rather than their elected representatives. Consequently, the
effectiveness of the councils to mobilize resources for local development was minimal.

© 2003 Alex Gboyega

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Thirdly, the regional governments saw local authorities as instruments of political
mobilization and therefore condoned whatever aberrations attended their operations so
long as they supported the government and appeared capable of delivering votes at
elections. Exclusive focus on the political role of local governments and poor service
delivery undermined the value of representative local government to citizens.
For the reasons stated above, the earliest attempts at introducing representative local
government in Nigeria failed woefully.

Each region was still grappling with reform ideas on local reorganization when the
military took over political power in 1966 and began a major shift toward centralization
of Nigerias federal system. Before the collapse of civil rule, Nigerian federalism was
quite decentralized. The distribution of legislative authority between the federal
government and the regions (as states were then called) was more balanced while
derivation principle was accorded a weight of 50% in the revenue allocation system. In
the 1970s, the revenue allocation system changed significantly in favor of the federal
government (Oyovbaire, ). Federal share of national revenues rose from below 50% to
about 80% during this period (Barkan, Gboyega and Stevens, 2001). In addition to
shifting economic resources to the center, the military rulers also transferred some
functions previously vested in the regions to the center. These changes and the
fragmentation of the four regions into twelve states combined to make the federal
government overwhelmingly stronger than the states. Lastly, the superimposition of the
hierarchical structure of military organization unto the structure of government
completely subordinated the states operationally to the federal government. For all
practical purposes, the states lost whatever autonomy they had had as components units
in a federal system of government.

Nigerias three-year civil war (1967-70) provided justification for such comprehensive
shift in the balance of power between the states and the federal government. Federal
officials justified these changes as being necessary to ensure that the federal government
had adequate resources to fight the war and to facilitate nation building. They believed
that the civilian regime collapsed because of excessive ethnicity and the competition for
hegemony among the three big ethnic groups in the country. Therefore, their strategy was
to weaken regional tendencies through policies that centralized economic resources and
political power. The government thought that this process would necessarily weld
Nigerias numerous ethnic groups into a strong, united nation. However, within a decade
it had become obvious that rather than unify the nation for rapid socio-economic
development, extreme centralization had created conditions for massive corruption and
inefficiencies in the delivery of services. Local government was all but extinct and even
state governments were no more than mere extensions of the federal government.

In 1976, therefore, the government decided to carry out local reorganization to enhance
decentralization as part of the transition to civil rule program. The program of
decentralization adopted assigned local functions on the principle of subsidiarity, seeking
to vest responsibility for services closest to the point of consumption and to provide
financial resources for meeting them. The three criteria applied in this process were to
assign to local governments functions that:
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(i)
require detailed local knowledge for efficient performance;
(ii)
in which success depends on community responsiveness and participation and
(iii)
which are of personal nature requiring provision close to where the
individuals affected live, and in which significant use of discretion or
understanding of individuals is needed (Gboyega, 1983)

Government applied these criteria to produce two lists (Federal Republic of Nigeria,
1976) of functions of local governments. The first list was considered the primary or
mandatory functions that all local governments had to perform. It comprised the
following items:
markets and motor parks;
sanitary inspection, refuse and night-soil disposal;
control of vermin;
slaughter house and slaughter slabs;
public conveniences;
burial grounds;
registration of births, deaths and marriages;
provision of community and local recreation centers;
parks, gardens and public open places;
grazing grounds, fuels plantations;
licensing, supervision, and regulation of bake houses and laundries;
licensing, regulation and control of the sale of liquor;
licensing and regulation of bicycles, and carts and other types of vehicles
except those mechanically propelled and canoes;
control or keeping of animals;
control of hoardings, advertisements, use of loudspeakers in or near public
places, drumming;
naming of roads and streets and numbering of plots/buildings;
control and collection of revenue from forestry outside the forest estate
of gazetted forest reserves;
collection of vehicle parking charges; and
collection of property and other taxes, community tax, and other
designated revenue sources.

The second list was vested concurrently in state and local governments. However, each
state government was to devolve them to its local governments when it ascertained that
they had capacity to perform them. This list comprised:
health centers, maternity centers, dispensaries and health clinics,
ambulance services, leprosy clinics and preventive health services;
abattoirs, meat inspection;
nursery and primary education and adult education;
information and public enlightenment;
provision of scholarships and bursaries;
provision of public libraries and reading rooms;
agricultural extension, animal health extension services, and veterinary
clinics;
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rural and semi-urban water supply;
fire services;
provision of roads and streets (other than trunk roads), their lighting,
drainage;
control of water and atmospheric pollution;
control of beggars, of prostitution, and repatriation of destitutes;
provision of public utilities except where restricted by other legislation,
specifically including provision of road and inland water transport;
public housing programs;
operation of commercial undertakings;
control of traffic and parkings;
regulation and control of buildings;
town and country planning; and
piped sewerage systems.

In practice, state governments regarded the second list as a list of permissive functions,
which they allowed local governments to perform under close supervision if they had the
resources to perform them. The fact that key social services such as health and educ