Government exists primarily to provide services that will make life worth living. Accordingly, local governments as third tier government are created to bring government closer to the people at the grassroots and for transformation of lives at the rural level. One of the ways of bringing government closer to the people at the grassroots is through the delivery of service in a satisfactory, timely, effective and adequate manner.This paper is therefore an examination of Local Government and Social Service Delivery in Nigeria. It argues that the constitutional mandate of local governments in terms of "function performance" has not been translated into reality. Thus, the paper concludes and recommends that local governments must attempt to overcome the challenges that have circumvented their performance. It is only by this can they be positioned to render cutting services in a timely, effective, adequate, prompt and satisfactory manner to justify their continuous existence and huge financial allocations to them.
Every ethnic nationality has got its own culture and cultural attributes by which the ethnic nationality is known and identified. The inter-play of these cultural attributes as religion or belief system, norms or rules of behaviour, language, history and artefacts, etc. gives rise to politics and determine the nature of the political process in the society, and also the level of pauperization of the people. This paper examines the concepts poverty, culture, politics, religion and ethnicity and how they have fuelled ethnic violence in Plateau State of Nigeria. The paper finds out that violence in the region is caused by the multiplicity of ethnic nationalities and cultures in the region; and the struggle for power and dominance between the cultures and ethnic nationalities within the region. These struggles create poverty through the destruction of human and material resources; and human and capital flight from the region. The poverty in turn causes anger, frustration and deprivations which further fuels the crises in the region and turns the crises into perpetual cycles that cannot end. The conflicts and violence therefore appear as liberation struggles by the native or indigenous population against the dominance of an alien population in the region. The paper therefore suggests the convocation of a sovereign national conference for the various ethnic nationalities in the country to discuss the basis on which the various ethnic nationalities can continue to remain under the authority of a single national government as the crises in the region affect the entire nation.
This article discusses the concepts of failure of states, fragility of states, and the prospects of peace in South Sudan. The article focuses specifically on judicial structural deformities in South Sudan under the qualitative and normative research methodologies, with structural functionalism as theoretical framework. Where preceding works had concentrated their South Sudanese peace-building recommendations on power-sharing mechanisms, this contribution emphasizes a long-term postviolence focus on the building of governance structures. The work recommends that while mediating in liberation struggles, it is critical for the intervening international community to consider the structures on ground, under which an envisaged independent state would thrive, as the prospects of enduring peace in the war-torn South Sudan are more dependent on the creation of such mechanisms than attempting to reconcile the defiant fighters.
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