CRITICALLY ACCESS INTERGOVERNMENTAL RELATION AND SERVICE DELIVERY/CITIZEN IN NIGERIA

Introduction

Nigeria’s model of fiscal federalism represents a fundamental legal and institutional framework for policy making in the country. As in other federations, it defines the core rules for resource allocation, distribution of responsibilities for service delivery, and mechanisms for interaction between different tiers of government.

Nigeria’s fiscal federalism arrangements are currently attracting increasing attention from both policymakers and analysts. This is a reflection of the fact that longer term perspectives of economic policy reform in the country are critically dependent upon improvements in the organization of inter-governmental arrangements. Such arrangements have direct implications for achieving national growth and poverty reduction targets. Simply put, there is a major need to strengthen the incentives of government agencies at all levels of authority to improve cooperation in designing of their policies and delivery of services. At the same time, capacity will have to be built to support such future inter-governmental cooperation.

The need for stronger cooperation and other reforms in federalism is driven by several factors such as the following:

a)     According to the Nigerian constitution, main public sector responsibilities are split across various government levels. Thus, no sole government could deliver radical improvements in service delivery on its own, which means that coordination and cooperation are pre-requisites. However, the existing mechanisms and institutions for inter-governmental policy coordination are weak and need strengthening.

b)     Significant fiscal decentralization of the public finance system have taken place since 1999. Given the existing resource allocation rules, such decentralization poses the risk of emphasizing – rather than taming - fiscal inequalities across the states. But the extent and trends in horizontal inequality remains undocumented, and no mitigation mechanism has been proposed as yet.

c)     Reforms undertaken in Nigeria since 2003 appear to have been more profound at the federal level than in the states. The benefits of drastic improvements in macroeconomic policies and fiscal discipline at the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) level are severely constrained by lagging reforms in the states. The FGN is actively exploring options for setting up - within its existing legal and institutional remits - new mechanisms to encourage states to accelerate reforms and to improve intergovernmental coordination in key service areas under joint responsibility.

d)     The reform of federal arrangements is politically sensitive. Reforms of the Federal system are likely to be gradual and based on broad political consensus. This underlines a need for broadening a public debate on key challenges in the existing model of fiscal federalism. The post-2007 election period may present a window of opportunity for addressing some of these issues, and it is important.

Conceptual Clarifications

The term intergovernmental relations over the years has been besmeared with semantic confusion. This multiplicity of efforts at conceptualizing intergovernmental relations has been largely responsible for the philological entanglement IGR has found itself. As an instance of the demonstration of this conceptual problem, some people have tended to understand intergovernmental relations as the interactions between and among governments (sovereign national governments). Whereas this conceptualization may not be completely wrong, especially at the global analysis of government, but it tends to paint a nebulous picture of the scope of our subject-matter and creates the impression that intergovernmental relations has to do with purely international relations matters. This may not be wrong given the fact that at the level of intergovernmental relations, policies pertaining to a country’s national interest and foreign relations are formulated and implemented (Abonyi, 2006). Again, Ejimofor (1987) opined that the increasing role of the national government in international affairs recently has tended to impact on federal-state relations.

Dichotomy Between Intergovernmental Relations and Federalism

The word “federalism” comes from the Latin word foedus, meaning “covenant.” A covenant signifies a partnership or marriage, in which individuals or groups voluntarily consent to unite for common purposes without giving up their fundamental rights or identities (Elazar & Kincaid, 2000). A covenant represents a theological concept and political idea that stands in contrast to organic governments based on a common ancestor and government based on conquest, or what Alexander Hamilton in 1787 termed governments based on accident or on force rather than on “reflection and choice.”

Federalism and its related terms such as federal and federation, refer to a type of government and governance that is established voluntarily to achieve unity while preserving diversity by constitutionally uniting separate political communities into a single limited, but encompassing, political community, such as a nation-state. In this case, it is probable such union results from the aggregation of separate, even independent, political communities into a federation (e.g. the United States) or from the disaggregation or transformation of a unitary state into a de jure or de facto federal arrangement (e.g. Belgium and South Africa). 

Insufficient Coordination in the Environment of Growing Inequality

Nigeria’s constitution provides for the participation of all three tiers of government in the delivery of core public services, such as education and health. This makes policy coordination an important pre-condition for effective and efficient service delivery. Several factors can be adduced as justification for building workable inter-governmental coordination mechanisms. As an illustration:

a.      in the environment of shared responsibility for service delivery, non-coordinated interventions of different government levels create a risk for duplication of efforts and sub-optimal allocation of resources.

b.      when there is an agreement on common national priorities and development objectives, such as those reflected in the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS), it is sensible for all government levels to align their actions with such priorities and thus complement each other’s efforts. This is because, as in common complex social systems, there is significant potential for synergies between coordinated policies and actions.

c.      finally, there is a case for the standard efficiency argument. Coordination could lead to better overall resource utilization through economy of scale, quicker project completion, and more efficient use of limited resources (such as specialized technical expertise). It also helps to facilitate dissemination of best management practices.

i.            Primary Health: Federal Government has been investing in construction of new primary health centers (PHCs), but states do not provide adequate financing for their operations. As a result, these facilities are heavily underutilized. At the same time, states spend an increasingly large portion of their health budgets on construction and operation of hospitals, which the Constitution defines as federal responsibility.

ii.            Water: All three government levels have been engaged in uncoordinated activity to drill new boreholes, and this frequently resulted in duplication of efforts. At the same time, there has not been much interest in the development of local water systems.

iii.           Roads: The national road network has been developed in an uncoordinated way, with too much political influence over technical decisions on priority road projects. Moreover, the lack of an agreed strategic vision resulted in under-financing of maintenance of the existing roads, their over-use, and the poor quality of roads which drive up the costs of domestic transportation.

2.        Issues of inter-government coordination in education

Primary education represents an important and interesting example of the status of

inter-government coordination in Nigeria. Sectoral analysis reveals nine out of 12 key management functions in the sector are concurrent, i.e. expected to be delivered by more than one government level. Thus, the sector has enormous needs for effective coordination arrangements. This challenge has been taken quite seriously by the sector leadership. According to a recent Department for International Development (DFID) report, based on cross-sectoral analysis, the existing arrangements in primary education currently represent the best example of vertical inter-government coordination (Improving Intergovernmental Collaboration…, 2005).

Still, there is a major need for further improvement. In education, similar to other sectors, more attention is paid to coordination of plans than to coordination of their execution. Moreover, the coordination effort is unevenly distributed across various management functions, with some functions being more popular than others. As a result, on one side, there is a noticeable duplication of efforts in some areas (school construction, school supervision) while insufficient attention to others (pre-school education, analysis/evaluation of sector performance).

Another weakness of the current arrangements in education relates to lack of clarity in the accountability framework. It is unclear which government level is responsible for achieving key educational outcomes. There are also major concerns about interactions between the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), a federal structure created to support primary education nationwide, and state ministries of education. There has been a common claim that instead of supporting state efforts to upgrade primary education, UBEC has been trying to run the primary school network without showing much interest in building state capacity to manage its primary education (World Bank, 2003). This undermines longer-term sustainability of the recent reform efforts.

Moreover, there is a sign of inadequate policy coordination even among federal entities operating in the education sector, such as the Federal Ministry of Education on one side, and UBEC and Education Trust Fund (ETF) on the other. An example is the latest government strategy document in the sector, the 2007-9 Education MTSS, which did not cover funding administered by the UBEC or ETF. These organizations continue to claim their policy independence from the Federal Government.

Finally, an additional area where there is clear need for strengthening inter-governmental coordination in education relates to the framework for resource allocation in the sector. The World Bank (2003) points to an absence of transparent rules for resource allocation based on clear national guidelines and recommended norms of per student spending, differentiated by type of educational facility. Lack of such rules leads to major horizontal expenditure inequalities within the education system, at the level of both individual schools and states. Within the current system, there is no clear strategy to address horizontal inequalities in education financing.

Recent Policy Developments in Nigeria

In Nigeria, there has been a gradual building of consensus that the federal government should start the withdrawal from the actual delivery of services and play a more active role in setting national policy, financing of priority services and monitoring. While there is no developed blue print to operationalize this strategy, the government has accumulated important practical experience under the Universal Basic Education (UBE) scheme. Further, as part of the 2007 budget cycle, the FGN has designed a new conditional transfer scheme.

Conclusions and Recommendations

The analysis in this paper suggests the following main directions for reforms to strengthen inter-governmental coordination:

a)     shift from joint service delivery towards co-financing, state/local delivery, and joint monitoring,

b)     more attention to equalization dimension of federalism,

c)     expansion in specific grant schemes focused on key MDG areas,

d)     strengthening accountability arrangements for how public money is spent, especially at state level,

e)     strengthening capacity of institutions responsible for inter-governmental policy coordination with NPC becoming a central player,

f)      facilitating inter-state competition on the basis of quality of service delivery.

Development partners could support Nigeria’s efforts in this area by:

i.            helping the FGN to carry out unbiased evaluation/monitoring of state performance

ii.            support FGN efforts to accelerate capacity building in states

iii.           concentrate donors’ support in reform-minded states, in particular states that are eager to cooperate with the federal government in service delivery

iv.           providing advice on the best international practice in organization of inter-governmental fiscal relations

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