AN EXAMINATION OF INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATIONS BETWEEN STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN NIGERIA

Abstract

Intergovernmental relations facilitate negotiation, non-hierarchical exchange of information, and cooperation between the institutions of the two levels of government.Local Governments needed to be accorded full financial and administrative autonomy and allowed to operate by the spirit and letter of the constitution for effective democratic governance. To this effect, various regimes had made frantic efforts to revive, reform, revitalize and restructure the Local Government system in Nigeria to enhance its freedom of action and remold it into an effective springboard for democratic governance and national development.Constitutionally, local government is the third tier of government which exists as an independent entity, possessing some degree of autonomy and sovereignty. Over the years there is a wide cry by most Council Chairmen on the incessant interference by the state governors. in the area of financial and administrative freedom, swift reactions and condemnations by various stakeholders.This research adopted participatory democracy as its theoretical framework. The theory postulates that the central idea behind the creation of a local government as a third tier is to bring development down to the people. The method of data analysis in the research is content analysis. This allows entails the use of the work of other scholars and documents from the government.It is in the light of the above that we are recommending among other things that (i) Local Government allocation should be paid into their account directly after the Federation Account Allocation Committee disbursementand (ii) State Governors who tempered with the Council's fund should be sanctioned accordingly.