In a unitary system of government, local offices are subject to a central authority.
<em>A unitary system</em> is a system of political organization in which most or all of the governing power resides in a centralized government. The opposite of a unitary system is a federal system.
In a unitary system all the decisions are made by the central government, the government delegates the authority and channels political decisions to sub- national units and local offices. But they only exercise the powers that the central government chooses to delegate to them.
A large majority of the world's states have a unitary form of government.
Mansa Musa, fourteenth century emperor of the Mali Empire, is the medieval African ruler most known to the world outside Africa. His elaborate pilgrimage to the Muslim holy city of Mecca in 1324 introduced him to rulers in the Middle East and in Europe.