LG Autonomy: No state can rewrite Supreme Court judgment- AGF

Nigeria’s Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Lateef Fagbemi, on Tuesday, cautioned states not to commit contempt of court by disobeying the verdict of the supreme court, saying that nobody has the power to rewrite the court judgment on the matter of the financial autonomy for the local government areas.

The minister’s comment was not unconnected to the recent decision of the Anambra State Governor, Chukwuma Soludo, to sign into law a bill that grants oversight power to the state government over the local government areas in the state.

Mr Soludo’s action is also in response to the recent judgement that granted financial autonomy to the local government areas, as against the current practice that places the LGAs at the mercy of the states.

The governor had warned that granting full autonomy to Nigeria’s 774 local government areas could lead to chaos, noting that such a move would not result in sustainable development.

The executive governor of Anambra state, Charles Soludo. 

AGF reacts

But the AGF has declared that nobody gave the 36 state governments any three months moratorium before the implementation of the Supreme Court judgment on the autonomy for local governments.

Mr Fagbemi who spoke with reporters in Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State capital, however, said while the implementation of the judgment remains sacrosanct, that there are some things that must be put in place before the full implementation, so that it would not run into problems.

Mr Fagbemi said there is no going back on the implementation of the judgment that grants the 774 local government areas financial autonomy “in order to ensure development at the grassroots level.”

He said the administration of President Bola Tinubu was determined to ensure all duly constituted and elected local government administrators received their allocations directly from the federation account.

Mr Fagbemi said: “Unfortunately I know it has been in the media that they gave them (governors) three months moratorium which is not the position. The position is that yes the judgment was delivered but we felt that there is a need to put some things in place before the full implementation. That it is going to be implemented is sacrosanct, nobody can run away from it.

“The question is, there are some things we need to put in place such that we will not run into problems when we start the full implementation of the judgment of the Supreme Court. There is no moratorium; moratorium for what? You know that before now some states have slated their local government elections beyond October.

“What we want to look at is; are they genuine when they said they are fixing the election beyond October? When did they first moot the idea? What is the law of their state however imperfect it may be?”

Delayed implementation

He said the federal government was looking at what the law of the affected states say.

“For instance, in the conduct of elections in some states, they will give six-month notice. If they don’t do that we know that no matter the kind of election you conduct, the court will nullify it. If we now say we just want to go the whole hug, then there will be a problem,” he noted.

He said the federal government does not want a situation whereby the court would nullify the elections conducted improperly and then force the stakeholders to “return to square one.”

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The minister said he knows there are one or two states that are “trying to commit contempt of court.”

“I won’t comment until they do the enactment to see where it takes us and where we are going. Are they going to re-write the judgment of the Supreme Court? When we get the full tenure of their law, we will take appropriate action,” the minister said.