Presidency Says Local Governments Should Lead Nigeria's Fight Against Poverty

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 has also ensured that the states are a lot more powerful now in terms of funding," Fasua said.

He pointed to improvements in salary payments and pension disbursements as evidence that things are moving in the right direction, noting that the era of civil servants being owed 12 to 18 months of wages is largely behind us. That is a real, tangible thing and worth acknowledging.

Then he went back to 1999. "In 1999, I used to go to many local governments in Lagos and I saw how local governments were working then. A lot of people were coming to the local government. The people who were really down financially, would go to the local government chairman on a daily basis and they were being settled," he said.

To be honest, that 1999 Lagos example is doing the opposite of what Fasua intended.

People going to a local government chairman daily to be "settled" is not a description of a functioning poverty alleviation system. It is a description of patronage politics, where financial survival depends on personal proximity to whoever controls local resources. That model builds dependency, not development. It rewards loyalty to a chairman over productive economic activity, and it disappears entirely when a new chairman arrives or when the money runs dry.

Nigeria local government autonomy poverty under Tinubu is a legitimate policy conversation. But the argument for it cannot rest on nostalgia for a system where poor people had to show up at a government office every day and wait to be handed something. That is not a solution. That is a symptom of the exact problem being discussed.