GODFATHERISM AND OFFICIAL CORRUPTION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR – A CASE STUDY OF THE STATE/ LOCAL GOVERNMENT JOINT ACCOUNT SYSTEM IN ENUGU STATE (MAY 1999 – MAY 2007).

ABSTRACT

One of the serious headaches that plagues the Nigerian political process is the phenomenon of godfatherism and its attendant official corruption. Since the inception of the 4’ Republic, the problem of godfatherism had become so pronounced and very disturbing as many states of the federation were faced with crisis of supremacy between the political godfathers and their estranged godsons.
These crises were usually accompanied by unbridled official corruption in the management of the affairs of these states as the resources of these states and their local Government Councils were deployed to service individual and or group interests while the welfare of the generality of the electorates were relegated and undermined. This ugly scenario became worsened with the introduction of the state local Government joint Account System by the states of the Federation. Since then, the revenue allocations disbursed to the states by the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) in favour of their Local Government Councils were seriously tampered with by the State Chief Executives and in worst cases
totally with-held on the guise of joint projects or any other contrived reasons. This study, therefore seeks to x-ray the operations of godfatherism and its attendant official corruption with a view to establish the relationship between the sponsorship of local Government Chairmen in Enugu state by the state chief
executives and the non remittance of full revenue allocations to various Councils by the State Joint Account Allocation Committee between May 1999 and May 2007. The study which employs Karl Marx’s Dialectical Materialism as its criteria of relevance utilizes the one Group-pre-test- Post-test Design in its analysis and concludes that there is positive relationship between the sponsorship of Local Government Chairmen in the state by their executive godfathers and the nonremittance of full revenue allocations to the councils during the period under review. Consequently, the study recommends, among other things, that the godfather scenario should be discouraged in Nigerian politics and that the Joint Account System should be expunged from the Nigerian constitution