Making Our Local Governments Work

Every morning, as I power-walk through my street, I see the same pattern: new houses springing up, streets filling with people who are invisible to the local government that is supposed to serve them. The Local Government Area office  that sits miles away, with no idea how many people who live in its layouts, who owns the properties, or what services are needed. We have managed to build a quasi-modern society on the ground, but our LGAs remain stuck in an administrative time warp. And the tragedy is that we seem to insist on not evolving them.

Please note that this article is not a finished blueprint. It is food for thought; a practical starting point that we can argue about, improve, and build upon. At its heart is a simple question: what if every resident belonged, in real time, to the LGA where they actually live?

Imagine that when you move into a new area, you don't just pack your bags. You walk into the LGA secretariat or open a portal and register your presence. You provide your existing State Social Benefit Number (most states now have one — Enugu calls its own ESBN; yours might have another name) and your Tax Identification Number (TIN). The LGA issues you a Local Resident Number that ties those two together and links you to a specific address, ward, and household.

You would be recorded not just as a name, but with a set of attributes that matter for local governance: Are you a tenant or an owner? Are you an indigene of that LGA, with ancestral ties, or a non-indigene resident? If you own the property and rent it out, you appear on a separate Landlord Register, linked to your property.

When you relocate to another part of the same LGA, you update your address. When you move to another LGA entirely, you notify your old LGA, and your registration only closes when the new LGA confirms you have been registered there. You receive a proof of delisting that travels with you. No individual exists in two LGAs at once as a living active resident. Your property could, but the bottomline is no living individual is forgotten.

The building blocks for this already exist. The ESBN or its equivalent is 'supposedly' designed to reach people with benefits such as: health insurance and cash transfers during election cycles. The TIN already sits in the national and  state's revenue database. We simply refuse to knit them together at the LGA level, where actual service delivery happens.

When every resident is registered against a real address, the LGA stops guessing. It knows, ward by ward, how many children need schools, annual births and deaths, how many households need waste collection, where the taxable adults live, and which communities are growing fastest. The census ceases to be a once-a-decade political battle and becomes a continuous validation exercise.

Crucially, it also changes the relationship between the people and their local government. When a residents' association at the ward level can point to the LGA's own data showing 2,000 households with no public water supply, the demand for service delivery becomes impossible to ignore. Local unions cease to be just informal pressure groups; they become structured counterparts to a transparent administration. Local government elections can begin to shift from patronage contests to debates about who can deliver measurable results to a known population.

And it doesn't require a constitutional amendment to start. One willing governor could pilot this in their state tomorrow by setting up the needed infrastructure and giving the existing social benefit database to the LGAs and mandating that all residents be registered locally before accessing state services.

There is a political dimension to this proposal that may, in the long run, be more important than the administrative one. Today, many LG chairpersons and councillors are invisible to the people they govern. They are known only at election time, and even then, often as the faces of larger patrons. Serving as an electedlocal government official, for too many, is an exercise in managing maanufactured scarcity  and keeping the governor happy at the expense of the people who are denied an opportunity to make structured demands.

But imagine a ward councillor who, armed with the LGA's own data, knows how many households in her ward lack pipe-borne water. She organises the residents' union, shows them the figures, and builds a collective demand. She fights for a budget line, monitors the contractor, and delivers. At the next election, she does not need a godfather's money or voice. She campaigns on a record: 14 new boreholes, every household registered for health insurance, street lighting restored to three neighbourhoods. Her reputation is local, earned, and verifiable. She becomes the face of governance, not just a messenger of distant power.

Multiply that across wards and LGAs over a decade, and you have a new political class: leaders who climbed one rung at a time on the strength of goodwill built through service. Such a ladder offers an alternative path to influence that does not depend on the old networks of patronage. It gradually draws talent away from those networks because it offers something they cannot easily buy: authentic community trust, backed by data.

The old players will not simply vanish overnight. But when a generation of local leaders can point to visible, documented results in office, the currency of politics will definitely shift. Politics really becomes local as power begins to flow to those who can deliver at the grassroots, not just those who can negotiate at the centre. And that, over time, changes everything.

Now lets agree that no honest proposal can ignore the complications. As some have asked me when I shared this idea: What about Nigerians who own properties in different states? Can someone have multiple social benefit numbers? Would this mean higher taxes, and how do we avoid making them feel punished for their success/privilege ?

These are exactly the kinds of questions we need to wrestle with transparency and openness.

In this model, a person's social benefit number is tied to their primary residence i.e., the place they actually live most of the time. Social benefits are, by nature, residency-based. You don't claim benefits in two states. So an individual would have one active ESBN-type number in their state of residence, linked to their LGA Resident Number there. In other states where they own property, they are recorded not as residents but as non-resident property owners in that LGA's Landlord Register, with their TIN linking their identity across states. Their tax obligations on those properties such land use charge, etc, would follow the property, not the person, and are no more punitive than what any landlord already owes. The system brings visibility, not extra burden.

So does this mean the 'well-off' would pay extra tax? Not inherently. It means that existing property taxes, which are already lawful, become more efficiently collected because the LGA finally knows who owns what. If you own three houses in three states, you probably already receive demand notices from three local authorities...often inconsistently and opaquely. The proposed system would simply make that process uniform and traceable. More importantly, it would demonstrate to the taxpayer that their contributions are funding visible services in those localities, rather than disappearing into a void.

Wealthy Nigerians often experience state attention only when someone is trying to take something from them. That has to change. The LGA must offer value in exchange for registration: recognised residency certificates that are genuinely useful for banking, passport applications, or business permits; updates on local projects; a direct channel for complaints. If registration brings tangible dignity and access, then the owner of multiple properties in multiple states is not a target; they are a stakeholder who can see, on a dashboard, what their property tax is funding in each LGA. The system must be built around service, not extraction!

A sensitive but essential feature of this proposal is that it does not pretend our dual system of land ownership doesn't exist. Alongside the resident and landlord registers, the LGA maintains an Indigene Register that records those with ancestral ties, land inheritance, and traditional status. This register is separate but cross-referenced. It ensures that the indigene question is settled by clear, verifiable data rather than by clan fights and rumour. Many local conflicts are rooted in ambiguity over who belongs where. A transparent register, openly maintained, can reduce that ambiguity rather than worsen it.

The ideas I've laid out are not foolproof. There are edge cases I haven't solved: the itinerant worker who moves every three months, the family living on ancestral land without formal title, the resident who refuses to engage with the state entirely. But that is precisely the point. We should not wait for a perfect system designed in a conference room in Abuja. We should start with the tools we have: the state social benefit numbers, the TIN database, even NIN, the existing ward structures, and build an evolving, local-first population system that learns as it grows.

Our local governments are underutilised not because the people working there are incapable, but because we have starved them of the most basic tool of governance: knowing who they govern. 

Until we fix that, every conversation about local government autonomy is hollow. This proposal is one attempt to fill that emptiness, and I offer it as a conversation starter, not a final doctrine. Let us pick it apart, improve it, and, somewhere in this country, simply begin.