Local Government: The Power at Your Doorstep: Full Edition

Why Your Street Floods, Your Clinic Has No Drugs, and Your Chairman Is a Governor's Puppet

The rain started at 3:47 a.m. on a Tuesday in July. Within an hour the gutters on Ojuelegba Road surrendered. By 6 a.m., No. 7 Ojuelegba Road was an island in brown, swirling filth that had been accumulating in blocked drains for three years. The local government responsible for those drains received ₦129 million that month. Not one bag of cement reached those gutters. Local Government: The Power at Your Doorstep is the accountability manual for Nigeria's most ignored tier of governance — the one that controls your road, your drain, your clinic, your market, and your primary school, and receives over ₦23 trillion from the federation account that state governors have been illegally intercepting for sixteen years.