Infotresting

Tope Fasua, Special Adviser on Economic Affairs in President Tinubu's Office of the Vice President, appeared on Channels Television's Politics Today and made the case that local governments, not the federal government, should be the primary drivers of poverty reduction in Nigeria. His reasoning: local governments are closest to the people, so the solutions should live there too. That logic is not wrong. In principle, proximity to communities should mean better understanding of what those communities actually need. It is why decentralisation is a mainstream development idea globally. But then Fasua illustrated his point with a 1999 memory that probably deserves more scrutiny than he gave it. "Fixing poverty is certainly a local government's thing because local governments are the closest to the people. So the solution to poverty in Nigeria is actually at the local government level, and that's the reason the President has advocated for local government autonomy, and ...