CROWE:
I asked my cousin why local governments getting autonomy is so clamoured for when no one else does it and he responded by saying peoples judgement is clouded by the "government" in their name, that there is no reason to scrap the states in favor of local governments.

If a governments jurisdiction is too small the government will be too weak and if it is too big effective governance becomes too difficult ergo the local governments are too small and the federal government is too big. The states aren't just random cut outs of land there is considerable deliberation across ethic and tribal lines and this isn't purely unfounded, Germans are industrial people while the Polish people aren't, so there are different economic priorities for Igbos, the Yoruba etc which is why the states somewhat seem to thread across tribal and ethnic lines on the other hand there is no reason why Plateau has 17 local governments while Kano has 45. The federal government was in direct control of Nigeria so it created the 36 states, on the local government level it is not ideal for a government so far removed from the situation to make informed decisions on the matter.

If Nigeria was going to do local governments and scrap the states we would still need to scrap the local governments and start over because like most of Nigeria's laws there was no logic put into their establishment so we'd at least have to do it right. Also, having multiple divisions like this only works when the orders come from the centre, if they are all autonomous efficiency will be lost, chaos would ensue as people would be headed in far too many directions, have you any idea what it would be like if the laws changed every few miles? Because since they are governments they have to have their own laws.

Also, most of the people who want more states only want it so their kin have a shot at governor so they cann get government money too, this is born from the fact that Nigeria is a hot bed for poverty and government is by far the easiest and surest way to wealth, it is a symptom and not a problem. 774 local governments would exponentially increase the cost of government and so will the fact that the central government would need to be a few times bigger to deal with them all. The failure of our states is due to the fact they they were never given any power to begin with, the central government holds all the cards with things like the exclusive list, they interfere with what the state governments want to do (like stopping Lagos from building a Lagos only power plant) and they have their grubby mits in the local governments as well, with all the interference and walls from the central governments state governments have become a powerless tier of government and it is more or less guaranteed that no one who really wants to do anything goes there and we are left with state governments populated by people who either don't care or just want the hand outs. There is no reason why our states shouldn't work if we allow them to, the states in the Nigerian experience as an argument is not the fault of the system but rather our implementation, the solution would be to change it but the local governments on the other hand have many practical and realistic arguments against it.

It would be nice if a few more people weighed in on this though.