Local Government Service Delivery in Nigeria: An Empirical Comparison of Government Efforts and the People’s Expectations

The under- performance of Nigeria’s 776 Local governments have continued to attract huge policy and research concerns in the last three decades. This, among other reasons is because huge amount of resources is committed to this vital tier of government annually from the federation account, with very little visible impact on the lives of the nation’s teaming rural population. This paper focuses on Ofu Local government in Kogi State – North Central –Nigeria. It evaluates how the local government has performed with regards to its internal workings and service delivery. The findings show that Ofu local government’s performance by all indices does not justify the financial resources it has received from the federation account in the period under evaluation. The reasons for this under performance ranges from corruption to slow and inefficient administrative processes but most important is the fact that the peoples input is left out in policy designs. Hence government interventions are significantly at variance with the people’s felt – need. The paper recommends among others, a bridge of gap driven by the active involvement of the people at all stages of programmes designed to offer them services