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Tayo Aduloju, Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Economic Summit Group (NESG), has called for stronger coalitions and better data systems to drive innovation in local governance and improve service delivery at the grassroots.
Speaking at the Gender and Inclusion Summit in Abuja, Aduloju said the scale of deficits at the last mile shows that interventions designed at the national level often fail to reach the people who need them most.
He said research by the NESG since 2022 had examined why interventions fail to reach communities, identifying what he described as three major characteristics of the last-mile governance system.
“First, you see a characteristics of something we call the disappearance of the experience of citizenship,” he said.
According to him, another challenge emerges when interventions deployed to local governments encounter what he described as “patron-gated systems,” where access to public services depends on personal connections.
“This is not when it’s not there. When deployed in the local governments run into patron-gated systems. In other words, if I can’t access the big man in my local government, I can’t access the services,” he said.
He said the challenge therefore extends beyond the institutions delivering public services to the individuals who control access to them.
“This creates a political imperative because this goes beyond the institutions that deliver to those that guard the gates,” Aduloju said.
He also identified the lack of coordinated action among stakeholders as another major barrier to effective local governance.
“We are almost never, as an ecosystem of actors, arriving in a coalition that is agreed on the outcomes we must see our people experience,” he said.
According to him, without addressing these challenges, policies designed in Abuja may fail to produce meaningful changes at the community level.
“Once you have these three characteristics, you can design all you like in Abuja, it’s not gonna happen where it matters for the child, for the person with disability, for the woman that needs the support, et cetera,” he said.
Aduloju said the first major innovation needed was a coalition model that brings relevant actors together around local government interventions.
“So where should innovation begin? The first innovation has to be the coalition model around which we arrive at the local governments. And that is so important,” he said.
He also called for greater innovation in the collection and use of data, particularly data that captures conditions at the household level.
“The second innovation that must happen is innovation around the data,” Aduloju said.
“As long as the household is not the unit of intervention, the units of analysis and the unit of measuring improvements will get lost.”
He noted that while Nigeria’s macroeconomic indicators may show signs of improvement, such figures do not necessarily reflect the experiences of individual households.
“So, take, for example, you take a data set like Nigeria is growing, correct. Macroeconomic growth has been established,” he said.
“The economy has stabilised, correct. Economic instability has slowed down. The reserves have grown, correct.”
“These are correct data points,” he said, stressing the need to examine what those developments mean at the household level.
“But when you take a micro data point like what is happening in the food basket at the household level, right? What is household income aggregate looking like? How much can they spend? How much is actually the expendable income?” he asked.
He said such household-level analysis would reveal whether economic gains were translating into improved access to services and better living conditions.
“How much of that income is going to services that local government and governance should deliver? Then you start to see the cracks,” Aduloju said.
