BUDGET IMPLEMENTATION AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT PERFORMANCE IN NIGERIA

The stories of disparity' between budget and its implementation in Nigerian public sector are replete in newspapers, public discourses and academic journals. Reasons advanced for this include: corruption, fluctuating oil revenue, unstable economic parameters and poor budget monitoring. The main thrust of this paper was to examine the reasons and solutions to budget implementation challenges in Nigerian local governments and to show how it has affected their performance. The expo methodology' was adopted and found the above assertions to be true. We recommend that any new budget effort should include gain sharing or similar incentives for agencies to perform as well as disincentives for agencies that perform poorly. The paper concludes that budgeting systems are most successful when they are coordinated and assisted by a government’s central administrative unit.