Abuja: The Case for Dry Fasting — Part Two

The case for putting Abuja on a financial dry fast — and the nations that prove the bottom-up road works. Second of two parts.

Last week I shared two stories from my podcast travels: Yemisi Iranloye, who located her cassava factory in a village encircled by farmland and changed 35,000 mainly female lives, and Saheeto, the King of Small Chops, who gave thousands of young Lagosians their first earnings by knowing Lagos Island at a resolution no federal database will ever capture. I ended with a claim: proximity is not a sentiment. It is a production input — and it is the one input the federal government structurally cannot supply.

This week, the argument that follows from it. If the people delivering development are the ones closest to the ground, then the money and the mandate must move closer to the ground too. That has consequences — for Abuja first.

The Case for Putting Abuja on a Financial Dry Fast

Here is the conclusion which, as a former Minister of Finance, I keep resisting and keep arriving at anyway: if this nation is to truly develop, Abuja needs to be put on a financial dry fast — in some areas. Not starved of its legitimate functions. Defence, monetary policy, foreign affairs, the national grid’s transmission backbone: these are federal by nature. But the interventions we persist in running from the centre — the SME loan schemes, the empowerment programmes, the training initiatives designed in a conference room and deployed identically from Sokoto to Calabar — should be pushed down to the level where the knowledge lives.

Consider what that means concretely. Subsidised loans allocated and administered locally, by institutions that know which trader actually trades and which farmer actually farms. Not borrower programmes where sponsors walk in fields then look for the borrowers. Training programmes that understand the local landscape: cassava agronomy in Oyo, leather in Kano, catering logistics on Lagos Island, not a uniform national curriculum that understands nowhere by trying to address everywhere. Every failed federal empowerment scheme I encountered in office failed at the same point — the last mile. The centre could disburse. It could not discriminate. It did not know, and could not know, who was real and what was really needed, what would work and what had failure built in.

The Nations That Went Bottom-Up

This is not a romantic theory. It is the documented development path of the most successful poverty-reduction episodes in modern history.

China’s post-1978 miracle did not begin in Beijing’s ministries. It began with Township and Village Enterprises — rural firms owned and run at local government and community level. Between 1978 and the mid-1990s, TVE employment grew from roughly 28 million to over 130 million people, and these local enterprises came to account for a substantial share of China’s industrial output. Deng Xiaoping himself admitted the TVE boom was a surprise to the centre: “this was not something I had thought about.” The greatest industrial take-off of the twentieth century was, in its first phase, a local government story.

Indonesia made the principle explicit. Its 2014 Village Law created the Dana Desa — the Village Fund — transferring money directly from the national budget to more than 75,000 villages, bypassing the intermediate blockages, with village assemblies deciding priorities. The fund has financed tens of thousands of kilometres of village roads, water systems, markets and early-childhood facilities, and village-level poverty has fallen measurably faster since its introduction.

India’s Kerala offers the most deliberate experiment. In 1996 the state launched its People’s Plan Campaign, devolving roughly a third of the state’s development budget to elected local governments, with local assemblies setting priorities. Kerala today posts human development indicators — literacy, life expectancy, infant mortality — that rival middle-income countries, on a fraction of their income. The consistent finding across all three cases is the same: when money and mandate move to the tier with local knowledge, delivery improves, because the deciders can see the ground.

The Objection, Answered Honestly

I know the objection, because I have made it myself. Nigeria’s local governments are, in much of the country, the weakest and most captured tier we have — their allocations historically absorbed into state joint accounts, their chairmen often selected rather than elected, their capacity hollowed out by decades of irrelevance. Handing them money, the argument runs, is handing it to the wind.

Two responses. First, the constitutional ground has already shifted. The Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment on local government financial autonomy — directing that federation allocations flow directly to local governments — removed the structural excuse. The pipe now exists. The question is what we build at the end of it.

Second, weakness is not an argument against reform. It is the argument for it. We do not conclude from a weak federal ministry that the federation should be abolished; we reform it. The same logic applies downward. Local delivery, like the state police I wrote about recently, is not a panacea — it depends entirely on design: published accounts, community oversight of allocation, performance frameworks of the kind Rwanda built into its imihigo local performance contracts, where mayors publicly commit to measurable targets and are publicly scored against them. Capture is a design flaw, not a law of nature.

And note what Yemisi Iranloye’s villages tell us about oversight. The most effective accountability mechanism in development is a stakeholder who lives beside the asset. Nobody in Abuja will notice if a training centre in Ado-Awaye quietly dies. Thirty-five thousand farmers will.

What the Diary Records

I spent over seven years at the tables where national interventions were designed, and I designed some myself. I understand the gravitational pull of the centre: the budgets are there, the press conferences are there, the sense of scale is there. But scale without proximity is how a nation spends billions and changes nothing.

The evidence from my podcast travels is consistent with the evidence from China, Indonesia and Kerala, and with everything I have written this year about the fourth tier: development is not distributed from above. It is grown from below, by people who know their patch, financed by systems humble enough to trust that knowledge.

One woman moved a factory to a village and changed 35,000 lives. Imagine what happens when the policy architecture stops treating that as a heartwarming exception — and starts treating it as the model.

Kemi Adeosun is a former Minister of Finance of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and former Commissioner for Finance of Ogun State. She is the founder of Nidacity.com and the Dash Me Foundation. She writes from Lagos.