Contending Issues in the Niger Delta Crisis of Nigeria - Journal of ...

Olawale Olaopa, Ibikunle Ogundari, Mike Awoleye, and Willie Siyanbola
will be closer to people at the local level the smaller the unit of
administration. But in practice this has not been the case (Ibid).
There are many reasons why this has not been achieved. The main
one has to be the fact that none of these mushrooming layers of
administration can sustain itself through taxation or production from
the people they purport to serve. They are distributive units for Oil
money.
Before Oil, the citizens had a sense that they were the producers of
the wealth of the country and therefore believed that government
must be accountable to them. As a tax based economy it was
vulnerable to protests and popular pressures. That is why the colonial
period and Nigeria's first republic recorded scores of tax riots and
popular actions by dominated classes. With oil, given that even the
people from whose land and shores the black gold is pouring out have
no contribution to its production, the margin of accountability is
criminally low and in most cases non-existent.
In a country where the notion of “tax payers money” has been
rendered meaningless outside of the comparatively small population
of civil servants, declining workers in industry and manufacture and
others in formal employment whose taxes are deducted at source
(against their wishes), the democratic demand that proclaims “no
taxation without representation” is rendered meaningless.
The attitude of government officials, in the view of Odiase (Op cit),
can be summarized thus: who are these taxpayers who want
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