When President Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu stood before the National Executive Committee of the All Progressives Congress and spoke about local government elections, allocations, and responsibility, he was not making small talk. He was naming a crime scene. His words, delivered with the ease of political banter, carried the weight of constitutional judgment: governors who manufacture local government elections own the consequences, and the era of diverting council funds has no legal shelter left.
For Kogi State, that statement is not abstract. It is accusatory.
Local government in Nigeria is not a decorative tier. It is a constitutional promise. Section 7(1) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) guarantees a system of local government by democratically elected councils. The phrase “democratically elected” is not ornamental language; it is a command. It presumes choice, accountability, and service. It presumes that councils exist to govern communities, not to launder funds.
Financially, the Constitution is equally clear. Section 162(3)–(8) establishes the Federation Account, from which revenues are distributed to the three tiers of government through the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC). While the State Joint Local Government Account was conceived as an administrative conduit, it was never designed as a licence for governors to seize, withhold, or appropriate local government funds as personal or political revenue.
That long-running fraud has now met its judicial end. In July 2024, the Supreme Court of Nigeria ruled unequivocally that local governments are entitled to direct allocation of funds and that state interference is unconstitutional. This was not judicial poetry. It was the legal closure of a criminal loophole.
President Tinubu’s NEC speech merely aligned executive reality with judicial truth.
Kogi State, however, has lived for years as if neither the Constitution nor the Supreme Court exists.
In Kogi, local government has been emptied of meaning. Councils exist largely as accounting fiction. Allocations arrive monthly from Abuja, but governance never arrives in communities. Salaries are delayed, staggered, or selectively paid. Capital budgets are announced but never executed. Primary healthcare centres are shells. Schools decay quietly. Roads erode into footpaths. What exists is not administration but extraction.
This is not incompetence. It is architecture.
Nowhere is this architecture more visible, or more damning, than in Lokoja Local Government Area, the state capital. A capital city without potable water is not suffering from policy confusion. It is issuing a confession. Water systems do not collapse accidentally. They collapse when maintenance funds are stolen, replacement budgets are diverted, and officials know that audits are theatre and accountability is myth.
In Lokoja, thirst has become evidence. It tells the story of stolen allocations more clearly than any forensic report. When citizens of a capital city fetch water like refugees, corruption has crossed from abstraction into bodily harm. This is no longer merely about governance failure; it is about the violation of the rights to life, dignity, and health.
Yet money alone does not explain the persistence of this system. Personnel policy completes the crime.
In Kogi State, thuggery has been elevated from street violence to governance strategy. Thugs are recruited into local government leadership deliberately. Not because talent is scarce, but because talent is dangerous. Competence asks questions. Integrity resists instructions. Professionalism disrupts theft. What a looting system requires is obedience, intimidation, and moral emptiness. Thugs supply these qualities cheaply and reliably.
Thus, local government chairmanship becomes a reward for loyalty to power, not service to people. Councils are run like occupied territories. Public consultation is replaced by fear. Budgets are treated as spoils of war. Elections are rituals without choice, scripted to preserve the extraction chain. When thugs preside, development is not merely unlikely; it is structurally impossible. Violence and progress cannot share the same office.
This is why Kogi’s local governments produce no development despite years of allocations. The system is not broken; it is functioning exactly as designed.
President Tinubu’s remarks puncture every alibi that has sustained this arrangement. His reference to “FAAC after FAAC” was not a joke. FAAC is the bloodstream of Nigerian public finance. Once allocations move directly to councils, as the Supreme Court now commands, the laundering architecture weakens. Opacity, the oxygen of this system, begins to suffocate.
Direct allocation changes everything. Council accounts become traceable. Expenditures become auditable. Chairmen must explain spending to citizens rather than patrons. Resistance to local government autonomy is therefore not ideological; it is criminal self-preservation.
What makes Kogi’s case especially corrosive is the normalisation of abuse. Citizens are trained to applaud token gestures while their collective patrimony is looted monthly through FAAC. Local governments are denied not only funds, but dignity: the right to plan, to hire professionals, to execute projects, and to be judged by outcomes. This is how democracies are hollowed out quietly—not with coups, but with capture; not with decrees, but with allocations that never reach their lawful destination.
There is also a human-rights dimension that cannot be ignored. When wages are withheld, the right to livelihood is violated. When clinics collapse, the right to health is breached. When schools decay, the right to education is denied. When water disappears, the right to life is endangered. Corruption here is not victimless. It is systematic harm inflicted on millions, sustained by fear and silence.
What is at stake here is not merely administrative reform but democratic survival. Local government is the closest layer of the state to the citizen; when it is captured, democracy is emptied from the bottom up. A country that tolerates the theft of council funds while preaching federalism is practising constitutional hypocrisy. Restoring local government autonomy is therefore not a favour to councils; it is a rescue mission for citizenship itself.
A state that recruits thugs into local government leadership is not preparing for development; it is preparing for instability. Thuggery rewarded with office guarantees future violence. The bill for today’s lawlessness will be paid tomorrow, with interest.
President Tinubu’s intervention has now removed every remaining excuse. The Constitution is clear. The Supreme Court has ruled. The money is traceable. Responsibility is identifiable. What follows is no longer a matter of policy preference but of constitutional obedience
If Kogi continues on its present path, history will not record this as error or neglect. It will record it as refusal—a deliberate rebellion against law, against citizenship, and against the idea that government exists to serve.
This is not mismanagement dressed up as hardship. It is intentional plunder, sustained by fear, silence, and political protection.
Tinubu has spoken.
Kogi must listen.
And Nigerians must insist.
Kogi Equity Alliance exists to defend constitutional order, demand accountable governance, and ensure that public resources serve the people—equally, transparently, and without fear
– Yusuf M.A., PhD
For: Kogi Equity Alliance (KEA)
