A CRITIQUE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT SYSTEM IN NIGERIA

The politics of local government reforms and democratic governance in Nigerian local government system has been an issue of concern to both local government scholars and practitioners, hence the desire for this study. The main objective of the study is to identity the challenging issues in various local government reforms and analyses their impact on local government democratic governance in Nigeria. The study ex-rayed various local government reforms from the colonial era to the present government in Nigeria. The findings proved that the various reforms before 1976 only encouraged local administration, and not local government. The study further showed that it was the 1976 reforms and 1979 constitution that formally brought local government as a third tier of government in Nigeria, although without autonomous political powers. However, since then, the reforms have not encouraged effective democratic governance at the local government due to the unequal relationship between the local government and other tiers of government in Nigeria. We recommend that in future reforms, the powers and functions of the local governments should be clearly defined as politically autonomous third tiers of government in Nigeria to enable the local government achieve effective democratic governance at the local areas, local government as the third tier of government and the closest to the people especially in the rural areas needed revenue to provide basic social amenities to the people. But it is unfortunate to note that the local government management have not lived up to expectation especially to provide basic social amenities to the rural people. Thus, another objective of the research was to analyze the extent to which poor revenue generation had affected the development of those areas. The following were some of the findings which included poor development of the areas, lack of basic social amenities to the rural people and lack of revenue to maintain the existing infrastructures. The researcher therefore recommended that the local government should provide basic amenities of high quality. By doing so, the people's interest would be geared towards giving their maximum support to the local government which would lead to the development of the rural area.