EFFECT OF VITAMINS C AND E INTAKE ON BLOOD ... - EuroJournals

European Journal of Social Sciences - Volume 2, Number 1 (2006)
crisis. Fiscal stress at the local level can be traced to three (3) broad sources, namely:
revenue-raising (taxing) responsibilities, revenue-sharing rights and those classified as
others.
Local government and revenue-raising (taxing) responsibilities
Revenue-raising responsibilities, otherwise referred to as tax assignment / jurisdiction,
are basically about the level of government that should control what tax. Control in this
context is seen from the point of view of who legislates about, administer, collect and
have right to what tax. This provides various levels of government with revenue they
can control under fiscal arrangement. In practice however, limited autonomy is given to
the lower tiers of government as the major revenue heads fall under the legislative and
administrative jurisdiction of the federal government while less bouyant sources are
devoted to the fiscal jurisdiction of state and local governments (Olowononi, 1999:194).
Detailed table on tax assignment is as presented on tables 1. It is clearly seen that the
major revenue heads fall under the jurisdiction of the federal government while the less
important ones fall under the other two lower levels of government. It must also be
noted that it is not all taxes collectible to any given tier of government that it can spend
and table 2 is clear on this. The specific taxes assigned to local governments are as
presented also on Table 3(c). Despite the extensive range of items/subheads,
insignificant portion of the total current revenue of local governments comes from
internal sources. Tables 4 and 5 show the current revenue structure as well as
external/internal sources ratio of local governments respectively. Table 5 shows that out
of the total revenue that accrued to the seven hundred and seventy four (774) local
governments between 1996 and 2003, an average of 6.7 percent was sourced internally
and the remaining 93.3 percent was from external sources (the federal and state
governments). Of the 93.3 percent, the state contributed 1.4 percent while the bulk sum
of 91.9 percent was contributed by the federal government. Due to relative
insignificance of revenue from internal sources, it must be mentioned in passing that a
clear case of a highly centralised (intergovernmental) fiscal system is established.
Local government and revenue-sharing rights
As it has been mentioned elsewhere above, spending responsibilities are assigned to the
three levels of government as spelt out in the constitution. Allocation or assignment of
revenue-raising responsibilities as well as spending responsibilities in a federation
usually gives rise to financial imbalances as the two are often mismatched. This is so
because it is virtually impossible in a federation to nicely adjust responsibilities to
financial resources (Anyanwu, 1997:170). The consensus among the scholars of
intergovernmental fiscal relations and even among the political class is that such
imbalances must be ameliorated through a variety of transfer (and borrowing)
mechanisms in order to allow various levels of government perform their constitutionally
assigned responsibilities.
The realisation of the need to ameliorate fiscal imbalances through a variety of
transfer mechanisms has not yielded much especially at the local government level. The
imbalances are very evident today as can be seen from Federation Account Operation
(Table 6) and such other transfers from Value Added Tax (VAT) proceeds, Grants and
Others, and stabilization fund as shown in Table 4 and Table 7 with respect to the local
governments of the selected states of Southwestern geopolitical zone of Nigeria. The fact
remains that the federal government exercises too much control over the distribution of
the federation account. For instance, it determines the sharing ratio and in addition
deducts other classified expenses from the pool, in the name of “first charges”, before
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