Financial autonomy is widely regarded as the single most consequential dimension of local government autonomy, because political and administrative independence at the grassroots level is of limited practical value to a local council that cannot control the resources needed to act on them. This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the constitutional and statutory mechanisms through which four jurisdictions, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, and India guarantee financial autonomy to sub-national and local government institutions, and evaluates the Nigerian framework against each. It finds that Nigeria’s State Joint Local Government Account, notwithstanding the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision directing its bypass, remains structurally weaker than each of the four comparator mechanisms examined, because none of them depends, as the Nigerian mechanism still does, on continuous judicial enforcement of a single Supreme Court judgment rather than a self-executing constitutional guarantee. The article concludes that Nigeria’s comparative deficit is not primarily a deficit of judicial doctrine, which the 2024 judgment has substantially remedied, but a deficit of institutional design, and it draws specific, comparator-derived recommendations for closing that gap.