Where are the billions? Let the grassroots breathe

Punch Nigeria · Folorunso Adisa · 2026-11-05 23:03 UTC

Despite a Supreme Court ruling and trillions allocated, local government financial autonomy remains stalled as governors allegedly control council funds.

Rashidat Lamidi is part of the staff of the Agbinpa Primary Healthcare Centre in Ede South Local Government Area of Osun State. She attends to pregnant women and sick children, answers emergency calls after the centre has closed, clears the compound herself and, when supplies run out, sometimes buys the consumables with her own money. A Premium Times investigation published in September found her at work in May, at the end of an hour’s motorbike ride from Osogbo, and she told its reporter that politicians and officials have visited over the years, especially in election season. “They come here, but they don’t do anything,” she said. Beside the clinic stands a staff quarters commissioned in March 1999, about two months before the Constitution that now governs how councils are funded took effect. The building is older than the republic, and the republic, as far as Agbinpa can tell, has only passed through.

A health worker at another centre in the same investigation said decisions about primary health centres are handled centrally by a state agency, which is part of the difficulty. For millions of people, the local government is the institution that ought to be closest to such problems. It should know which street floods after a downpour, which market lacks sanitation, which health centre needs attention and which community has waited too long for a borehole. In too many places, the distance between the council chairman and the people he governs is nearly as wide as the distance between those people and Abuja.

DevReporting’s investigative documentary, LG Billions in the Dark, takes that distance as its subject. It examines the prolonged leadership crisis that has disrupted governance across Osun State’s thirty local government areas and the Modakeke Area Council, and uses that crisis to ask what becomes of public money and public services when political control and public allocation come apart. I joined the discussion at the University of Lagos last Thursday, where Mojeed Alabi of DevReporting convened the screening and Femi Falana delivered the keynote, and I left persuaded that the title is a question the record already answers. The billions are largely with the state governments.

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