Where are the billions? Let the grassroots breathe

Rashidat Lamidi is part of the staff of the Agbinpa Primary Healthcare Centre in Ede South Local Government Area of Osun State. She attends to pregnant women and sick children, answers emergency calls after the centre has closed, clears the compound herself and, when supplies run out, sometimes buys the consumables with her own money. A Premium Times investigation published in September found her at work in May, at the end of an hour’s motorbike ride from Osogbo, and she told its reporter that politicians and officials have visited over the years, especially in election season. “They come here, but they don’t do anything,” she said. Beside the clinic stands a staff quarters commissioned in March 1999, about two months before the Constitution that now governs how councils are funded took effect. The building is older than the republic, and the republic, as far as Agbinpa can tell, has only passed through.

A health worker at another centre in the same investigation said decisions about primary health centres are handled centrally by a state agency, which is part of the difficulty. For millions of people, the local government is the institution that ought to be closest to such problems. It should know which street floods after a downpour, which market lacks sanitation, which health centre needs attention and which community has waited too long for a borehole. In too many places, the distance between the council chairman and the people he governs is nearly as wide as the distance between those people and Abuja.

DevReporting’s investigative documentary, LG Billions in the Dark, takes that distance as its subject. It examines the prolonged leadership crisis that has disrupted governance across Osun State’s thirty local government areas and the Modakeke Area Council, and uses that crisis to ask what becomes of public money and public services when political control and public allocation come apart. I joined the discussion at the University of Lagos last Thursday, where Mojeed Alabi of DevReporting convened the screening and Femi Falana delivered the keynote, and I left persuaded that the title is a question the record already answers. The billions are largely with the state governments.

The price of that arrangement was laid out in detail. In Ikoyi, Osun State, stands what can only be described as the carcass of a hospital, and roofless school buildings have become refuse dumps. At Oore Primary School, in Boripe LG, there was reportedly a single teacher, who doubled as headteacher, and a young boy, Omotayo Timilehin, spoke of losing school because the nearest available one lay about ten kilometres away. At Abebi Afilaka Health Centre, Atakumosa West LG, the matron said deliveries were conducted by torchlight, and at Olugunna Health Centre, Osogbo, residents described a non-functional facility without drugs. It is difficult to discuss the dividends of democracy with a straight face when a woman in labour must depend on a torch.

The financial side of the discussion was no less troubling. One chairman in Osun, Hon. Ajibade Sikiru Oluwatoyin, said he could not access council funds. Another, Adegoke Ogunsola, said he did not know how much was paid into his council’s account each month, as he had neither access to the account nor the benefit of its transaction alerts. A chairman who cannot establish what his council receives cannot be held to account for what it builds.

Ogun State has given us a sharper warning about what befalls a chairman who presses the question. In 2023, Hon. Wale Adedayo, then chairman of Ijebu East, accused Governor Dapo Abiodun of withholding council allocations. Within days, his councillors suspended him; they impeached him two weeks later, and the Department of State Services detained him for several days. The state government insists the removal was a lawful response to allegations of financial misconduct and had nothing to do with the governor, and in December 2025 a High Court in Ijebu Ode nullified the removal. The sequence is one that Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born teaches readers to distrust, since a society that scorns the man who refuses the general scramble teaches everyone else to join it or keep quiet. The state’s chairmen, for their part, apologised to the governor.

None of this should have survived July 11, 2024. On that day the Supreme Court affirmed the financial autonomy of Nigeria’s 774 local government councils in Attorney-General of the Federation v. Attorney-General of Abia State and 35 others. It directed that allocations be paid directly to the councils instead of through state governments, and it held that governors cannot lawfully replace elected councils with caretaker committees. The Attorney-General of the Federation brought the suit, and President Bola Tinubu welcomed the outcome, promising that what is sent to local government accounts “will be known.”

More than two years on, the promise has not been kept. The PUNCH reported in July that implementation remained stalled, even though N10.479tn was allocated to local governments between July 2024 and June 2026, and that governors still controlled money meant for the councils. That figure covers every council in the federation, and Osun’s share is only part of it. It also measures what was allocated, which differs from what any council could spend, and that difference is the whole story. A government that went to the Supreme Court, won, and has not enforced its own judgment has produced a presidential statement where it owed a transfer.

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The mechanism is older than the judgment. Section 162 of the 1999 Constitution routes council allocations through a State Joint Local Government Account, a conduit meant to carry the money to the councils that has too often become a tap the governors control. The Supreme Court has ordered the pipe bypassed, yet the governors who hold the tap are the ones whose cooperation the order still needs.

I think the autonomy debate has been fought on one front when it needs three locks. The first is the money, which the Supreme Court has already ordered released. The second is the ballot. Councils are elected through state-run electoral commissions, and a chairman who owes his seat to the governor’s party machine may have little reason to spend independently of the governor, whatever the account says. Falana linked public apathy toward local government to the failure to conduct credible elections, which is the same argument seen from the voter’s side.

The third lock is the books, and here the press matters. Dapo Olorunyomi (our very own legendary journalist, Uncle Dapsy) told the audience that an accountable government requires an accountable press, and a council’s accounts mean little to residents unless someone can read them, explain them and print what they find. Allocations should be published every month. Budgets and expenditure records should be open, procurement should be transparent, and the cost of each project should be disclosed. A chairman should be able to say how much was spent on a road, who received the contract, when it was completed and what the community gained. The same scrutiny applies to the state governments that have long controlled council funds, because accountability cannot be demanded of one tier while another escapes it.

Governors have an argument, and it deserves an answer, too. Direct payment, they say, hands billions to chairmen who may spend them badly, and Justice Habeeb Abiru, dissenting, held that the court should not intervene where a council and its state have agreed how funds are managed. The reply is that the present arrangement has been tried and is the one that produced the conditions described above. But the governors’ point carries a warning for reformers. A chairman who spends billions without regard for public priorities has simply moved the location of the problem, and to the woman with the bucket the difference between a council captured by a governor and one captured by an unaccountable chairman may mean very little.

The Fourth Schedule leaves no doubt about what councils are for: local roads, streets, drains, public conveniences, refuse disposal, markets and motor parks, with a share in primary education, agriculture and health. Some of the roads that trouble residents belong to the state or the Federal Government, but a funded council should at least be able to identify problems, act where it is empowered and press the other tiers where it is not.

Each party has a task. State governors must release what the Constitution says is not theirs. The Federal Government must enforce the judgment it won and publish, month by month, what has reached each council. Chairmen must show that direct access produces measurable improvement, and citizens must insist that the right to vote carries the right to know. DevReporting is trying to close the gap in knowledge. It launched the Development Reporting Africa Foundation at the screening and plans to take the documentary to campuses across the six geopolitical zones, and reporting of this kind is slow and costly and survives on public support.

The question the documentary asks has an answer, and it is less mysterious than the title suggests. The billions are largely where the Supreme Court said they should not be, and the boy who walks ten kilometres to school and the matron who delivers babies by torchlight cannot wait for another round of conversation. A court can say where the money belongs. Only a government can send it, and until this one does, the grassroots will go on waiting to breathe.

The conversation does not end here. You can continue it with me on X via @folorunso_adisa, LinkedIn: Folorunso Fatai Adisa, or on Facebook at Folorunso Fatai Adisa.