An Exposition of The Relevance of Local Governments in the Administration of Grassroot in Nigeria

The focus of this paper is to reiterate the need for the existence and notscrapping of Local Governments as the third tier of Government in Nigeria.There are presently three levels of governance in the country today. Due tothe way Local Governments are being handled by the politicians, especially,the State Chief Executive, Governors and the leadership of political parties,which has made this third tier of Government to be almost irrelevant, a lotof debate is going on concerning whether to scrap the Local Governmentsystems completely and concentrate on the remaining two tiers viz; Federaland State or not.This paper looks into the origin of the local governments as aconstitutional creation and examined its sources of funding as well as broughtout the special duties statutorily allocated to this third tier, in comparisonwith the three arms of government – Executive, Legislature and the Judiciary– each working without disturbing the others. Problems with the localgovernment system as currently ran in Nigeria and why they are seeminglyineffective was also expensed. The piece finally submits that since theLocal Governments as the statutory third tier of Government in Nigeria isthe closest to the people at the grass root, and democracy has been defined as government of the people, by the people and for the people, the armmust rather be strengthened instead of being scrapped.