LOCAL GOVERNMENT SUPERVISION AND SERVICE DELIVERY IN NIGERIA: A STUDY OF THE BUREAU OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND CHIEFTAINCY AFFAIRS, BENUE STATE (2007–2015)

Abstract

This study examines how the Bureau of Local Government and Chieftaincy Affairs (BLGCA) 

supervised local councils in Benue State, Nigeria, between 2007 and 2015, and what that supervision meant in practice for local administration, intergovernmental fiscal relations, and development at the grassroots. Using a qualitative, desk-based research design built on David Easton’s Systems Theory, the study asks a fairly direct question beneath its technical language: did the Bureau help councils govern, or did it stand in their way? The evidence points clearly to the latter. Despite institutional reforms that were ostensibly designed to expand local government autonomy and notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s July 2024 ruling affirming 

that local councils are entitled to receive their statutory allocations directly the Bureau functioned for most of the study period as an instrument of centralised state control, exercised through financial manipulation, administrative dominance, and political interference. These overlapping forms of control weakened service delivery, hollowed out democratic selfgovernance, and slowed development across the state’s 23 local government areas. Read through Easton’s framework, the Bureau corrupted the very mechanism meant to convert public resources into public goods: it distorted inputs before they reached councils, degraded the outputs communities actually received, and broke the feedback loop that should have connected citizen dissatisfaction to political accountability. The study concludes that this supervisory arrangement sits in direct tension with the constitutional promise of local government autonomy in Section 7(1) of the 1999 Constitution, and that it is fundamentally 

incompatible with the principles of democratic and fiscal federalism that Nigeria’s constitution 

claims to uphold.