PUBLIC FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT AND SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA: THEORIES FOR DISTRIBUTION OF GOVERNMENT RESOURCES

The pawpaw/papaya and pineapple theories offer the managers of government resources two vital contemplations and scenarios in sharing government resources or public goods. The theories are postulated using two basic natural resources, such as pawpaw/papaya and pineapple fruits. Pawpaw or papaya (botanical name) and pineapple fruits are agricultural products and are considered most appropriate for use when they are fully ripped for demonstrating the sharing processes. These thoughts, as supported by Basic Resources Theory (Udoh, 2017), are advanced in attempting to resolve the surrounding issues on the concepts of equality and equity in the sharing of national and state resources in Nigeria, in particular, and the globe, in general. While the pawpaw/papaya theory has a single sharing stream, the pineapple formula has two variances, the vertical and the horizontal perspectives. The case in point is that with fiscal federalism in mind, which places a premium on how financial resources of government are shared among the federal, state and local government areas, the pawpaw/papaya theory represents equality, fairness and justice on the one hand; while pineapple theory represents equity and shrewdness on the other, respectively. In Udoh et al, (2018) the idea of fiscal federalism has received the endorsement of John Rawls' theory of justice whose basic assumption is on ''the socially just distribution of goods in a society.'' A cursory and critical observation reveals that adopting the pineapple theory in financial sharing, among tiers of government is to attempt some level of subtlety and shrewdness towards the lower levels of government by the higher level of government. This is so due to the assumption that pineapple does not ripe round the entire fruit equally, at the same time, unlike pawpaw/papaya. This implies that without any careful observation of the use of the pawpaw/papaya approach in the financial sharing among tiers of government, the system or the process offers total fairness, equality and justice among all levels of government.