Nigeria is giving its states more room to govern, but greater autonomy will not automatically produce better government. The real test of decentralisation is whether states can use their growing responsibilities to develop, test and sustain solutions that improve the lives of their citizens.
For decades, Nigeria’s federalism has been dominated by arguments over who controls power and revenue. That debate remains important, but it has obscured a more consequential question: what should states do with the powers they have?
The answer should be experimentation. States should become laboratories of governance, testing different approaches to electricity, transport, healthcare, education, sanitation, revenue collection and local service delivery. Successful models should be measured, documented and adapted elsewhere. Failed ones should be abandoned. Without that discipline, decentralisation risks becoming little more than the transfer of responsibility from Abuja to state capitals.
The opportunity is becoming more significant. Recent reforms have created greater space for states to participate in electricity markets, while debates over state policing and the emergence of regional development commissions are expanding the scope for subnational action. States are also receiving substantial federation revenues. In June 2026, the federal, state and local governments shared N2.551tn in federation revenue, with states receiving N838.2bn. Federal Ministry of Information and National Orientation
But money and authority are not substitutes for institutional capacity. A state that receives greater powers but continues to govern through weak planning, poor accountability and political patronage has not achieved meaningful decentralisation. It has merely moved the location of failure.
The laboratory model offers a different approach. The idea, associated with US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, is that individual states can test policies and generate lessons that others can adopt. Its value lies not simply in producing a successful outcome but in understanding the system that produced it.
Nigeria once had something closer to this model. The regional governments of the 1950s and 1960s pursued different approaches to education, industrialisation, housing and local government. Competition between regions encouraged governments to demonstrate what they could achieve.
Military rule weakened that tradition by concentrating political and administrative power at the centre. The Fourth Republic inherited much of that centralising instinct. State governments often became more focused on securing federal allocations than on developing distinctive approaches to governance.
That cannot continue if Nigeria is serious about making federalism work. Consider basic municipal services. Waste management, drainage, local roads, sanitation, primary healthcare and emergency response are among the issues citizens encounter most frequently. Indeed, governments rarely treat them as opportunities for systematic experimentation.
A state could, for example, test a new waste-management model in selected local governments, establish measurable targets, publish the cost and results, and determine whether the model should be expanded. Another state could study the experiment, adapt it to its own conditions and improve it.
That is how a federation should learn. The problem is that Nigeria often copies policies without copying the institutional thinking behind them. Lagos provides useful examples in revenue collection, traffic management and employment support, but policies developed for a large, relatively formal and highly urbanised economy cannot simply be transplanted into states with different economic structures.
‘The same principle should apply to local government. States cannot credibly demand autonomy from Abuja while resisting meaningful autonomy for councils. A decentralised federation should allow citizens to see a clear connection between the responsibilities of local institutions, the resources they receive and the services they provide.’
Nigeria needs policy adaptation, not policy cloning. This distinction matters because states differ dramatically in population, economic activity, revenue capacity and administrative strength. According to a 2026 analysis of subnational finances, more than 30 states still derive over 70 percent of their revenue from federal allocations. Nigeria Economic Summit Group
For weaker states, experimentation may require cooperation rather than competition. Electricity, transport corridors, security, waste management and urban expansion frequently cross state boundaries. States should therefore be willing to pool resources, share technical expertise and develop regional solutions where individual action is too expensive or ineffective.
Regional Development Commissions could become useful platforms for this purpose if they are designed to develop durable systems rather than simply distribute projects.
The same principle should apply to local government. States cannot credibly demand autonomy from Abuja while resisting meaningful autonomy for councils. A decentralised federation should allow citizens to see a clear connection between the responsibilities of local institutions, the resources they receive and the services they provide.
Citizens, meanwhile, need to change the questions they ask of the government. A governor should not be judged only by the number of roads commissioned, schools renovated or projects inaugurated. Citizens should ask: What problem was identified? What was the proposed solution? How much did it cost? What changed? How was the result measured? Can the system survive the governor who introduced it?
Those questions move accountability from political spectacle to institutional performance. Universities and policy institutes also have a role. Nigeria already has organisations tracking public projects and comparing government outcomes. The next step is to understand why one state performs better than another. Studying the systems behind successful outcomes would help governments distinguish between policies that can be transferred and those that require local adaptation.
The objective should not be to produce 36 versions of the same government. It should be to create a federation in which different states can test different solutions, learn from failure, improve successful models and share what they discover.
Some experiments will fail. That is not evidence that the laboratory model has failed. Refusing to experiment while continuing to repeat unsuccessful policies is a much greater failure.
Nigeria’s development challenges cannot all be solved from Abuja. Nor should every solution have to originate there.
The real promise of federalism is not simply that it moves power closer to citizens. It is that it gives more governments the opportunity to learn what works. Nigeria’s states now have greater room to act. They should use that room to experiment, measure, cooperate and build institutions that outlast political administrations. Decentralisation should not produce 36 smaller Abujas. It should produce 36 opportunities to discover better ways of governing Nigeria.