There is no doubt that the role of local government in engineering grassroots development in all ramifications remains germane. As third tier of the government, local governments serve as most close and proximate to the people. Generally, there are three functions associated with the local government which also constitutes the needs for its existence in the running or administration of the nation. These are: Political functions, administrative functions, development functions. In spite of all these constitutional stipulated functions, local government has been criticized for being in-efficient and un responsive. This paper was designed to assess the State-Local Government joints accounts in Nigeria and its implications for grassroots development. The paper argued that the magnanimous failure of local government in meeting up with its expected goals is as a result of the introduction and the subsequent implementation of the State joint Local Government account system in Nigeria. This had largely constituted and generated a lot of controversies in the polity such as the allegation of indiscriminate deductions from the statutory allocation of the Local Government by the State Government and its concomitant effect on Local Councils productivity. The paper proffered many solutions which among others included local government autonomy, strict supervision of local government finance through federal body etc. The paper was conducted using secondary source while content analyses was used in analyzing the source materials.