Local government involvement in national development planning; guidelines for project selection based upon Nigeria's Fourth Plan experience

Abstract

This article is concerned with effective local government participation at the project selection stage in the development planning process. The context for analysis is Nigeria's first experience with local involvement in national planning. A novel evaluation scheme is elaborated and applied in assessing the proposals submitted by two local governments, Kaduna and Bauchi, for inclusion in the Fourth National Development Plan. The findings reveal serious distortions in both local development plans and demonstrate the utility of employing an uncomplicated multidimensional impact analysis scheme in the evaluation and selection of project proposals.

Decentralization, local governance and ‘recentralization’ in Africa

“…The central government abandoned its direction of localities at the same time that it severely starved the states of the money and personnel they needed to replace the centre and direct much of anything at the localities. Central (or state-level) control was largely ended, but the absence there of a viable and broadly based local political process opened the door for local interests to capture many available resources, usually for roads or in corruption (Olowu and Wunsch, 1995;Wunsch and Olowu, 1996;Koehn, 1989). The upshot was that local planning was not much better in Nigeria, at least in the few short years local government existed in the 1990s, than anywhere else.…”