Abstract

Local government system is the requisite machinery for rural development. The creation of local government anywhere in the world stems from the need to facilitate developments at the grassroots. This is because local government service delivery system affects the day-to-day activities of citizens at the grassroots. Regrettably, the state of development in rural areas of Nigeria is unacceptably grim with slow overall economic growth and development and hence remains a contentious issue in Nigerian federalism. The indices of this sordid situation include poor agricultural productivity, gross infrastructural deficit, rapid population increase, unemployment, lack of social amenities, among others, which had culminated in dehumanizing rural poverty and underdevelopment in all ramifications. The failure of local government as an institution to solve the ongoing problems of the people at the grassroots gave rise to the introduction of the 4^th-tier government - the Community Government Council by Imo State government in 2012 as alternative strategy to addressing the challenges of rural dwellers. However, a comparative study of the two models was done and findings showed that, the Community Government Council is more people and development oriented than the local government counterpart. The paper adopted the decentralisation theory and utilised both primary and secondary data. Qualitative method of analysis was used to analyse the mass of data generated via primary source. Finally, the study recommended inter-alia that, Local Governments and Community Government Councils should co-exist as partners in progress, be adequately funded and freed from all forms of political interferences for aggressive rural transformation.