The novelty of this paper lies in three contributions: In the first place, as far as we
know, this is the first attempt to use actual household access to public goods as a measure of
provision of public goods in studying the relationship between democracy and public goods
provision. We chose this method to overcome the problem of leakages between allocation of
public funds and actual delivery of basic needs due to the problem of rent seeking in most of
the developing countries2. Nigeria had consistently ranked as one of the most corrupt
countries since 19853. Measuring provision of public goods with public expenditure will not
be applicable when corruption such as this is pervasive especially in developing countries.
This study is an answer to the recent called by the World Bank on the need to depart from the
use of public expenditure as measure of service delivery to the citizens (World Bank, 2008).
Secondly, this is the first case study as far as we know that compares service delivery
under military rule with democratic rule in sub-Saharan Africa in general and particularly in
Nigeria. Filling this gap is important considering common occurrences of military
interventions in politics in the sub region due to the perceived failure of the democratic
governments to meet the aspiration of the poor majority.
Thirdly, we are not aware of any study on the effects of ethnic diversity on the
provision of public goods especially at the sub-national governments either in sub-Saharan
Africa or in Nigeria though many of these countries are both highly heterogeneous and
decentralized.