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The Nigerian voter, having spent considerable time queueing at polling stations, arguing about PVCs, fighting over results and eventually accepting that Nigeria had chosen its president, might reasonably have expected the new administration to get on with the business of governing.
The narrative above is replicated across the 774 local governments in Nigeria. The Supreme Court judgment on Local Government financial autonomy remains iced over in practice. State governors continue to treat local councils as administrative subsidiaries rather than an autonomous arm of government.
The optical message broadcast to the public is one of relentless vigilance, a leader ensuring the masses are not shortchanged. The institutional reality, however, is that governance has vacated the cabinet room and wandered into the realm of amateur site supervision.
Nigeria is once again standing at a constitutional crossroads. The growing insecurity across the federation, from banditry in the North-West, secessionist violence in the South-East, kidnapping in the South-South, farmer-herder clashes in the Middle Belt, and urban criminality in Lagos and Abuja, has pushed the debate over state police from intellectual seminars into the centre of national survival.
Back in 2017, human rights lawyer Inibehe Effiong caused a stir when he accused former Akwa Ibom governor Godswill Akpabio of looting the state treasury on a scale that could fund neighbouring Ebonyi State for decades.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 