Challenges to the capacity of Local Governments to Advance Democracy in Nigeria

Abstract

In the quest to ensure that government gets down to the grassroots through participatory democracy, local government in Nigeria was established as a third tier after the federal and state levels. Unfortunately this role appears to have eluded the local governments in Nigeria.. This paper sought to investigate the dimensions of the challenges to the advancement of democracy by local governments in Nigeria. To do this, the researchers resorted to use of secondary data. After an extensive research, this paper argued that democracy failed in Nigeria because, as an essential tier of government, the local Government has been rendered ineffective, not only by the other tiers of government, but by the provisions of Section 7(1) of the 1979 Constitution of Nigeria and Section 7 (1) & (6) of the 1999 Constitution. The researchers concluded that there was need to ensure that democratically elected councils should be allowed to thrive in Nigeria. The paper, therefore, recommended that the state Independent Electoral Commissions should be scrapped and in their place, it should be the responsibility of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct elections into the Local Councils.