The legislature is unarguably the fulcrum upon which democracy rests. Democracy, in this context, is representative government. Thus, the institution of the legislature as an assembly of elected representatives becomes the engine room of the structural framework upon which democratic governance is built. As history has shown, the beauty of legislature is greatly enhanced by a healthy multi-party system wherein elected representatives from different party backgrounds engage one another alongside party ideological positions with a view to deliberating on issue of governance and socio-economic well-being of the people. Legislative cross-carpeting in Nigeria is becoming a norm rather than exigency, and is taking a negative toll on the capacity of legislatures to fulfill their mandates as against functioning as merely rubber-stamp annexes of the executive/ruling party. This study examines the impacts of the wanton cross-carpeting, often times bereft of any ideological underpinning, that have characterized legislative assemblies in Nigeria and its implications on good governance. Among others, it concludes that concrete legal and political frameworks must be developed to check the direction of cross-carpeting in Nigeria’s legislative houses if good governance is to be entrenched.

This paper examined the relationship between intergovernmental fiscal relations and service delivery in the context of financial autonomy in Okitipupa Local government area of Ondo State. It is within this prism that effort was delved at exploring the extent to which Nigeria local governments perform constitutional responsibilities to the people at the grassroot level and the attendant yearning for financial autonomy. In examining this, the work dwells on Efficiency-Services theoretical escapade and adopted both primary and secondary sources of data collection for robust discussion with descriptive survey research design. The finding of this study revealed among others that there is a correlation between local government financial autonomy, primary education and primary health services delivery in Okitipupa local government area of Ondo State. Based on the findings, it was concluded that poor service delivery in the Nigerian local areas is as a result of the financial yoke that local governments bear with the attendant State Joint Local Government Account in practice in the country. The paper therefore recommended among others that local government should be given more autonomy to generate, allocate and utilize its funds in line with the peculiar needs and aspirations of the people at the grassroots level, complete scrapping of State Joint Local Government Account, scrapping of caretaker committees among others.