Legal Impediments to Sub-National Infrastructure Development in Nigeria : Deploying Institutional Bypasses to Circumvent Regulatory Inefficiencies

Nigeria's poor infrastructure development has long been an inhibiting factor to unlocking Africa's largest economy. In this paper, I argue that Nigeria's Constitution is complicit in occasioning this infrastructural quagmire, owing to the fact that it unduly hinders sub-nationals in Nigeria from driving their own infrastructural development and that in a federalist state such as Nigeria, some measure of sub-national autonomy is required to achieve any meaningful infrastructural advancement. Further, at the sub-national level I examine how legal impediments (such as fiscal dependency & regulatory inefficiency) continue to sabotage the much-needed infrastructure revolution in Nigeria. Finally, deploying the institutional bypass theory, I attempt to proffer implementable solutions to remedy some of the challenges that constrain sub-national infrastructure development in Nigeria