Nigeria: Zamfara and the Principle of Co-Operative Federalism

opinion

Under the canopy of the National Good Governance Tour team, I have been privileged in the past few months to go round the country and see for myself whatever development efforts that have been made by the various political actors at the various levels of government. The visits have put me in a vantage position to compare and contrast the character of the political operators at the states and local governments and their administrative philosophies, approaches or styles. With this advantage, one is able to see who is doing something that is worth recommending to others for emulation and who is doing what is not so ennobling that deserves rebuke as we are engaged in the search for a viable development paradigm that can help accelerate our rate of progress.

One of the noteworthy things which I observed about Zamfara state, which the team visited last week, is that its government, led by Abdul-Aziz Yari Abubakar, has been wise enough to recognise the need for what I will describe as co-operative federalism in its quest to bring development to a state that is easily one of the least developed in the country. The government has seen that there are a lot of federal government funding schemes that states can take advantage of for the development of their own domain. This recognition is significant because there are many states of the federation which appear either ignorant of what they can take from the Federal Government for the benefit of their people or they are simply unwilling, for whatever reasons, to avail themselves of the quota of goodies they are entitled to from the central government.

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