The travail of service delivery and developmental failure in post-independence Nigeria

Given the increase in public demands for socio-economic and developmental services, along several plans and resources committed to public services by Nigerian government, poor service delivery has continued to bedevilled development in post-independence Nigeria. Extant studies have linked factors such as lack of accountability, political instability, governance constraints, corruption, bad-governance and Western penetration among others to developmental failure in Nigeria. However, this study argues that poor service delivery attitudes have impacted negatively on developmental programmes in Nigeria. Thus, for Nigeria to achieve speedy development, there must be a positive change in the attitudes of government and its officials towards service delivery particularly, to ensure fairness, responsiveness, equity, accountability and justifiable profit maximization which are necessary ingredients for boosting peoples’ confidence in the government and its institutions, which would help the government to garner peoples support required for developmental programmes and discourage or minimize other anti-developmental pathologies in Nigeria. Key words: Service delivery, developmental failure, post-independence.