Federal government financing of grassroots decay in Nigeria: the case of Edo state

Abstract

In this research article, an attempt is made to locate the failure of local government councils to construct rural development poles in the context of patrimonial redistributive politics that greeted the emergence of the Nigerian petrostate. The failure of the third tier to transit into a local pole of development, controverts the assumed linkage between grassroots development and creation of more local government councils. Empirical evidence from Edo state has demonstrated ‘reverse resource flow’ in favour of urban and semi-urban locales. In this process, enhanced revenue flow through federal statutory allocation is ‘reverse transfer’ to the centres through the mechanisms of urban extractive ratio. The de-poling so engendered creates more decay than existed pre-fragmentation. By the character logic and organization of these new local governments (political post); they mediate the crisis of rural-urban exploitation and rural-locale depoling, in a self-reproduction project typical of patron-client politics. In this context, it is assumed that phenomenal growth in statutory and allied revenues accruing to rural locales has not produced the desired development, but undesired decay.