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LOCAL GOVERNMENT REVENUE AND PERFORMANCE: A STUDY OF SELECTED LOCAL GOVERNMENTS IN KWARA STATE, NIGERIA
Grassroots development has always been a highly prioritized issue on the agenda of almost every nation of the world. In Nigeria, several efforts have been made by various administrations towards achieving this developmental goal. The 1976 Local Government Reforms was a great move in this direction. What actually distinguishes this reform effort from all other previous reforms in Nigeria was its formal and unequivocal recognition of local government as a distinct level of government. This was equally reinforced by several constitutional provisions in the 1979 and 1999 constitutions. Despite these great efforts which many believed would guarantee local government autonomy, there still exists a number of unresolved issues which hinders local government performance. In Nigeria, local governments get 20% statutory allocation, 10% from state‟s internally generated revenue, value added tax (VAT), excess crude oil „windfall‟ couple with their locally generated revenue, yet, their level of project execution remain highly unsatisfactory to residents. It is therefore against this background, that this study investigates local government fiscal management and intergovernmental fiscal relations. It equally reviews statutory allocations and internally generated revenue of the selected local governments. The paper adopts the use of questionnaires to elicit data on the perceptions of local residents on the level of local government‟s performance. Result shows that a strong approach to expand the scope of local autonomy will have to come through a corresponding expansion in IGR mobilization, which implies that when local government assumes a level of fiscal self- reliance, autonomy expands and performance level begins to appreciate.
Key words: Local Government, Revenue, Performance.