Re-inventing local government capacity in Nigeria: The e-governance imperative

Significantly, e-governance has advanced from global to in-country, national, state, and local levels of government. Despite its importance, little evidence exists in Africa nay Nigeria, on the effect on local government manifest capacity. The paper provides a framework for understanding the role of e-governance in enhancing local government capacity in Nigeria, its many challenges and opportunities. The paper reviews various governments' initiatives on e-governance between 1999 and 2010. Questionnaire were also administered on officers of local government councils in southwestern Nigeria with a view to assessing local government capacity in ICT acquisition and deployment; and the efforts towards transforming the local government into e-governance, as a tool of achieving transparent and effective governance. Findings revealed that there is little impact of the deployment of Information and Communication Technologies and their application for the administration of local government. Likewise, there were notable integration problems due to lack of political will on the part of the government. The paper concludes that efficient local governance requires an effective, efficient and responsive public administration system; and that a good deal of the promise of democratic governance can be more readily accomplished not by mere adoption of ICT but also through appropriate adaptation.