Supreme Court Judgement on Local Government Autonomy Simply States the Law As It Is, Says Liborous Oshoma

A Lawyer and Human Rights activist, Liborous Oshoma has said that the Supreme Court of Nigeria’s direction of local governments to receive their allocations directly from the accountant general of the federation, was simply a case of “stating the law as it is”, noting that such a provision is already prescribed in the fourth schedule of the constitution.

He made this comment during an interview with ARISE NEWS on Friday while discussing the functions of the local government as provided by the constitution, adding that Nigeria’s problem of not implementing laws is what has led to the misconceptions and misunderstanding of the functions of the local government with regard to financial autonomy.

Oshoma said, “What this judgement has simply done is to state the law as it is. In Nigeria, our problems are not a lack of laws. Even this law as it is, if we were to implement it, ordinarily, we won’t have this problem, but implementation is the key problem here. At the local government level, what happens, because of corruption, you now bring incompetent people and at the end of the day, these same people will tell you the local government has been reduced to nothing and they are really not doing anything. While in the actual sense, what has happened is they completely take away the functions of local government, ensure that the people that are there are people who are there at the mercy of the governor, who will kowtow to the governor and once that guy is there, he dare not complain because when you’re on the table, you don’t complain. So that’s the challenge.”

The lawyer however hailed the ruling as “a step in the right direction,” which “will encourage people to now begin to look into the local government revenue the same way people look at state revenue.”

On another hand, Oshoma also called for the amendment of section 197 of the constitution in order to allow for a democratically elected local government council. He said, “Administrative charges for collection of funds by virtue of section 163. It is a step in the right direction but until we also amend section 197 to ensure that the election into the local government is conducted by a body different from state electoral body, we will just be dancing around the issues because at the end of the day, the state governors are still going to appoint people into these local governments.”

He added, “We don’t critisise state electoral bodies the way we critisise or talk about INEC. If we channel half of the energy that we use to talk about INEC to some of these state electoral bodies, we’ll probably not have the selection processes that we have at the state level and we’ll be able to say truly, with this judgement that we’ll be able to get a lot from it.”

Speaking on how to ensure that this judgement would be obeyed and how to enforce and implement it so that the local governments in Nigeria can be strengthened, he said, “I think at some point we’ll have to use some strong means to implement some of these laws. If you look at section 7, the system of a local government by democratically elected local government council is under this constitution guarantee. So, there is no room for mayor, caretaker or whatever name. So if funds that are meant for local government should be sent directly to local government, I also think that funds meant for local government should not be given to persons who are not democratically elected at the local government level.

“We will still have challenges like I said, section 197, but at least we will have semblance even if they are pretending to conduct election, we will have semblance of democratic process at the local government level. Unlike where governors just sit down, wait for their tenure to expire or in some cases, sack the entire local government, create a law by the state house of assembly who have become an appendage of the state executive, and then just sack an entire democratically elected local government and put in place a caretaker committee under the guise of ‘we are not able to conduct elections now’.

“There is no state in Nigeria where we don’t conduct national elections, so I see no reason why we can’t conduct local government elections in all of these states. At least let’s pretend to have an election. Let’s push these states to have democratically elected local government officials at the state level. Otherwise, let the federal government keep these funds at a pool, an interest hidden account until these states are able to conduct local government elections.”

Melissa Enoch

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