A critical aspect of the social science discipline has to do with the inherent debates surrounding conceptual exactitudes. The concept of local government is not immune to these social science disputations. In the case of Local Government however, strongmen in developing political systems have carried the conceptual debates too far, by consequently presenting local government practice as rocket science, obscured by elite greed and everyday predation. The local government system in Nigeria is immensely characterized by this obscurity, greed and hands-on predation. Hence, the major problem of this study borders on the relationship between a predatory local government system and the shape of national development in Nigeria. In this paper, we have made attempts to suggest alternatives to the predatory system of local government in Nigeria, whose aim of serving as vehicles for service delivery, are widely believed to have been largely defeated.

A critical aspect of the social science discipline has to do with the inherent debates surrounding conceptual exactitudes. The concept of local government is not immune to these social science disputations. In the case of Local Government however, strongmen in developing political systems have ca...