Forget Aso Rock. The real horror show isn’t always in the corridors of national power. It’s in the ramshackle offices of your local government, the ones with peeling paint, missing records, and thrones occupied by men who confuse public service with personal conquest. While many Nigerians fixate on Abuja as the symbol of national failure, the rot eating into the soul of this nation has taken permanent residence at the grassroots. That’s where the foundation of dysfunction has been laid — by local champions of mediocrity and merchants of manipulation who weaponize poverty, illiteracy, and sentiment to stay in power.
These so-called grassroots leaders — often ill-educated, brazen, and celebrated for their capacity to “carry boys” — are not just elected officials; they are political warlords, community cult heroes, and kingpins of influence. From chairmen who can’t draft a budget to councillors whose only development plan is buying a new Lexus, governance at the grassroots has become a tragic farce. According to a 2023 report by the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), over 65% of local government areas in Nigeria do not operate with functional budgets. Most LGAs can’t account for how statutory allocations — which reached over ₦1.5 trillion cumulatively in 2022 — were spent. Roads remain death traps, health centers rot away, schools resemble abandoned poultry farms, and boreholes exist more in project briefs than reality.
Worse still, these men and women, hailed as “Honourable,” are the prayer points of many desperate families. Mothers in villages and slums, watching the hollow glamour of stolen wealth, cry to God at midnight: “Let my son be like that Honourable.” The same “Honourable” with a forged WAEC certificate, zero legislative impact, and a rap sheet longer than his manifesto. They build one borehole, abandon seventeen others, donate rice in election season, and claim divine mandate when caught in scandals.
It gets more terrifying when you realize these figures are often more powerful than state governors in their local domains. Their grip is tighter, their methods cruder, and their consequences more immediate. They are the first layer of political indoctrination. The ones who recruit the thugs, rig the votes, inflame tribal divisions, and dictate who gets what in the wards. And yet, they move without scrutiny because we are too busy debating the presidency while ignoring the local mafia next door.
Corruption is no longer an elite sport played in the chambers of Abuja. It is grassroots religion. It has been normalized, baptized, and canonized in our culture. It thrives in churches where thieves are given front row seats. It blossoms in markets where traders sell their votes for ₦500. It reigns in homes where parents urge children to ‘join politics’ not to serve, but to ‘hammer’. And it lives online — where we rage against distant devils while dining with the demons next door.
Before you compose another politically correct analysis about constitutional reform or presidential restructuring, ask yourself: who is your councillor? Have you ever seen your ward’s youth leader? Do you even know what your local government chairman looks like? Because until we face the rot under our noses, until we confront the tragedy that local government in Nigeria has become, and until we stop applauding criminals because they share handouts, no amount of messianic rhetoric from Abuja will change our story.
This is Nigeria’s true nightmare — not in Aso Rock, but in your ward office. Not at the top, but at the bottom. And until we clean the dirt beneath our feet, every change at the top will be built on a rotten foundation.
