<![CDATA[Nigerian local government occupies an unusual constitutional position. It is guaranteed as a tier of government by the 1999 Constitution, its functions are listed in the Fourth Schedule, and since the Supreme Court's judgment of 11 July 2024 in Attorney General of the Federation v Attorney General of Abia State it has been held entitled to receive federal allocations directly, bypassing the State Joint Local Government Account through which governors had long channelled and withheld local funds. The judgment has been celebrated as a vindication of grassroots autonomy. This article argues that the celebration is premature, because the constitutional position of Nigerian local government is heteronomous rather than autonomous. Local government did not create itself, does not define its own powers, and does not control the terms of its own financing. It is a creature of the federal centre, brought into constitutional existence by the military reforms of 1976 and entrenched in the 1979 and 1999 constitutions without ever acquiring the status of a federating unit. The article develops the concept of constitutional heteronomy to describe this arrangement, distinguishing it from federal autonomy on the one hand and mere administrative delegation on the other. It then reconstructs the genealogy of local government from the 1976 Dasuki reforms through the 1999 Constitution, analyses the fiscal architecture of Section 162 and the State Joint Local Government Account, and reads the 2024 judgment as an episode in the centre's long-standing strategy of using local autonomy as an instrument of central discipline over the states. The political logic of Nigerian local autonomy, the article concludes, is centripetal rather than decentralist, and the current constitutional reform proposals will reproduce that logic unless they give local government an independent constitutional foundation rather than a better-administered dependency.]]>
Copyrights © 2025
