In this interview, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria and a chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, Adeniyi Akintola, speaks on the recent Supreme Court judgement which granted autonomy to Nigeria’s local governments. He argues that although the Supreme Court is not just a court of law but also a court of policy, the verdict was not well thought out, except the dissenting judgement. Excerpts:
The Supreme Court recently gave a judgment which granted autonomy to Nigeria’s local governments. Governors don’t seem to like that judgment and it is thought that their disposition might affect effective implementation of the judgement. What do you think?
I wouldn’t know, only God knows tomorrow but what I want to clarify is that many people who are blaming the Supreme Court justices are probably ignorant of the fact that the Supreme Court is not just a court of law but also a court of policy.
That court is there to stabilise the polity. Where the legislative or the executive arm of government oversteps their bounds, that court is there to checkmate them. Of course one might not agree with the decision of the Supreme Court, I don’t agree with it, I must confess. Even though I concede the fact to them that the Supreme Court is a court of policy, not just a court of law, I don’t believe that the Supreme Court should go ahead to amend the constitution. I don’t believe that, it’s like setting a bad precedent.
Secondly, I don’t think the judgment was well thought out, except the dissenting judgement. The two sides have their sound reasons but a closer look at our political development will show anybody that who is articulate enough to appreciate it that Nigeria is a federation, Nigeria’s founding fathers fought for it, stood by it and any time anybody tries to truncate that aspect of our federalism, Nigeria runs into a ditch. For example, before the Lyttleton Constitution was put in place in 1954, Azikiwe was more of a centralist but Sardauna and Chief Awolowo were federalists. They gave their reasons.
Nigeria is a country of many nationalities and many people are yet to imbibe that hard fact. That is why many of our compatriots make mistakes when they want to put a law in place. When they conceive a law, they don’t appreciate the sociological milieu of the people and any law that is put in place without taking into consideration the sociological milieu of the people and their way of life, that law will not fly, including constitutional provisions. That is why today we have so many dead laws in our statutes that cannot fly that nobody can implement or put into practice.
Is the Supreme Court judgement on local government autonomy one of them?
This judgment is one of them. It is very difficult to implement it. Let me tell you how.
The logjam of local government joint accounts started in Ibadan. In 1988, the issue of ‘zero allocation’ started and it was going to lead to riots in Ibadan, in Kano and Sokoto. The municipal councils were getting zero allocation and the man who started it was the chairman of Ibadan Municipal, Taofeek Arapaja.
More local governments had not been created then. He issued a circular which said all non-indigenes of Ibadan Municipal who were teachers should go back to their states and local governments. He issued the circular because he could not pay salaries of his workers and teachers in his domain.
He also discovered that a good percentage of those teachers were from outside the local government and he was going to the bank to borrow money. There was tension and it got the attention of the government. The SSS waded in, but a similar thing was happening in Kano and Sokoto and the military government put heads together to find a solution.
They came up with the joint account system wherein they will pay the salaries of all those essential workers after which they will now start allocating the money left. That was the genesis of Section 162 of the Constitution. That section is still there. That also saw to the bringing in of Section 7 – which was not there in 1979.
Secondly, people have forgotten that in that same 1999 Constitution which we are operating, there is a provision there for the Auditor-General of Local Government, which is under the state executive. There is also a body now called SUBEB which is a parastatal of the state.
As we speak, the local government is no longer in control of primary schools; it is SUBEB which is a parastatal of the state.
People are talking about stealing local government money. That is despicable. No reasonable person will support the stealing and governors have been living large on that. They have been stealing the money. But, like the Yoruba will say, beheading is not the cure for a headache. We had provided an antidote to that through the report of the 2014 confab. I was a member. Why have successive governments, including the one that convened the conference and the present government, are afraid to implement the recommendations?
Yes, it is good to checkmate the governors; it is good to take their hands away from the local government funds but that has been provided for in the confab report. Why must we now cut our nose to spite our face? It’s like strengthening the central government again and we have been clamouring for the decentralisation of devolution of powers.
We keep on taking one step forward and several steps backwards in this country. It’s just like the elections we have been conducting; no civilised country of the world conducts elections the way we have been conducting them, it is like a unitary form of election and some people are clamouring for the same INEC to go and conduct elections at the local government. One begins to wonder which school they went to. I cannot understand it. For as long as we have this type of centralised elections, we cannot have peace in this country. All these have been tackled in the confab report.
“I don’t think the judgment was well thought out, except the dissenting judgement. The two sides have their sound reasons but a closer look at our political development will show anybody who is articulate enough to appreciate it that Nigeria is a federation”
There are calls that all the sections that tie the local governments to the apron strings of the governors should be expunged. What do you think?
There are many of such that this judgment did not take cognisance of. I’ve just given the example of the Auditor-General of the Local Government. It is an institution established by the same constitution. Teachers through the Nigeria Union of Teachers have written to ask that their money should not be sent to the local government.
One of the problems I see is the inability of the various arms of the government to face the challenges before them. For instance, I’m in court with the government of Ekiti State over the decision of the state government to empower a parastatal to name a street.
It is the function of the local government established by the constitution. As we speak, all the functions of the local government have been taken away by the state. The state now manages markets, abattoirs, parks and burial grounds. I remember that it was the government of Bola Tinubu that fought the Federal Government to a standstill over approval of building plans.
It is the duty of the local government. We won, the Supreme Court gave them judgement that it is the function of the local government and not that of the Federal Government. Having won that case, they now took over that function of the local government which they fought the Federal Government against. They are now doing the same thing.
The recent protests in parts of the country were destructive in the North but it is obvious that enough was done to curtail its degeneration to violence in the South. What would you say about the destruction in the North and how do we prevent a recurrence?
We should appreciate God for the elite leadership in the South West. We should appreciate our clergymen, the community and other leaders. Given the backdrop of what we saw during the EndSARS, none of us supported any form of protest from the word go.
Even before the protest commenced, we had expressed our opposition towards it and I am one of the people in the South West that stood against it. It was agreed that anyone who came to the South West to cause violence should be dealt with because of what we went through during the EndSARS.
The South West suffered monumental losses and we witnessed monumental destruction at that time. I was living in VGC and I was caught up in the protest and things were so terrible. The only forensic lab that is functioning in the whole of West Africa was worth billions of dollars, was burnt down. The historical Igbosere High Court in Lagos, where probate records that dated back to as far as 1860, were destroyed. Not only that, over 500 buses, private and public properties were burnt and destroyed. The shopping centre at Ikota was completely looted. In Ibadan, five police stations were burnt.
Among those arrested in Ibadan were non-residents. So, from the backlog of that experience, we were against that protest from the outset because we knew that, from the way the protest was advertised and tagged “Day of Rage”, it was frightening and might not augur well. So we stood up against it and campaigned against it, and we thank God for all those who participated in ensuring that no such thing took place here.
Protest is the constitutional right of everyone, but there is no freedom without limitation. People talk about fundamental human rights, yes that is guaranteed by the constitution. I myself had been in the struggle when I was younger during NADECO. I had protested and had been detained many times. But we never destroyed anything. Even when we were being brutalised and locked up, we didn’t resort to destruction of property.
One of my colleagues, Mr. Gbenga Awoyode was handcuffed by a Commissioner of Police who afterwards engaged him in a boxing duel and removed two of his teeth. This happened in this town and it was not because Gbenga Awoyode went out there to champion the destruction of any property. So it was with Uncle Moshood Erubami, I cannot count the number of times that man had gone into detention in this town and elsewhere. We all know what happened during the era of ‘prisoners of war’. We participated in all that, people that were detained were denied bail.
I happened to be a leading counsel that went for their bail, Gani Fawehinmi will send one of his boys, Ubani to join us in Ibadan here. I was also counsel for the NUT in Oyo State and we were all in the struggle with their leaders, Comrade Abiala and we never destroyed anything.
Well, this has come and gone and we thank God that those who came out to protest in the South West never embarked on any form of destruction and violence. Look at it, we cannot close our eyes and allow people to come and destroy the little infrastructure we have here. Look at how long we had been fighting to have monorail in the South West. Jakande was putting finishing touches to it in 1983 but Buhari came and cancelled it when he overthrew Shagari. We never got to have a metro line again until Sanwo-Olu came. Now we will watch while it is destroyed again? After spending billions of dollars to put it in place…?
Yes we are all hungry, we are all suffering; it affects everybody. Everybody is feeling the pinch, but should we allow the little infrastructure to be destroyed willfully?
I love what they did in the East too. There they never participated in the protests at all. In the North, it is very unfortunate that they have started tasting what we have been swallowing in the South West for a very long time. It is very unfortunate.
The Kaduna State governor said what they witnessed in the North was a failure of leadership and a failure of the northern elite and the government. Do you agree with him?
I agree absolutely with Governor Uba Sani and a gentleman, Dr Hassan. I agree that it was the failure of the elite. I watched the demonstration and the destruction that accompanied it.
When I heard what the people were saying, I became so afraid that I had to say a prayer for Mr. President at 2am. This is because this wasn’t his making; it was something we have been living with for a very long time. Seeing people go to destroy the iNET Village in Kano was disheartening. I saw one educated man from the North saying that they didn’t appreciate anyone coming to build an expressway or a computer village for them but that what they wanted was food. He said the president could go ahead and build an expressway for them in the South to Port Harcourt so that what they needed was food. I became so afraid seeing children of five or 10 damning everything without caring for anybody. I saw people hijacking armoured vehicles and I became so afraid. So, when I listened to Governor Sani, I could not but agree with him.
What do you think is the cause of the differences in the way the protests went in the South and the North?
The efforts of the leaders in the South West paid off. We went all out. I remember that for about three days, some of us did not sleep. For those who supported the protest, we were practically abusing each other on our platform but it was a healthy debate. The conversation was raging and we engaged one another in intellectual discussion and those of us who have political value went all out to tell our people not to support protests. I told my local government chairman why he should not allow violent protests in our council but people should be allowed to air their grievances.
My local government area is rural and it would be a lot of work to speak grammar there to convince the people and lead them to destructive activities, but we must guard against that. We mobilised our people against it, we must confess that.
Contrary to what people are insinuating that we were against the protest because of Tinubu, that is not true. No, it was not because of Tinubu but because of the destruction we witnessed during the EndSARS.
We have not recovered from the destruction; Nigerians from the South West extraction have not recovered from it. Those who were in Ibadan then knew the level of destruction in Ibadan, so we knew what we were doing.
Like the governor of Kaduna State had observed, what happened in the North is a failure of the elite. Over the years, they have abandoned what they should have been doing. They have left undone the things they should have been doing.
For instance, in the South West here, hardly will you see anybody who is 60 years of age down who is not educated up to primary school level. You will not come across anyone who is 60 years old who is not educated up to primary school because then, it was compulsory and parents send their children to school.
But some of the elite in the North are of the opinion that they get a different kind of education from what is prevalent in the South West, and that what we refer to as ‘out-of-school-children’ are not out of school per se.
They didn’t embrace Western education on time, so I agree that the Eastern (Arabic) form of education is also a form of education. But the Western education, which is very key to development, is not there.
I grew up in the North, I lived there but if not for the Nigerian factor, I wouldn’t have come back to the South. The truth of the matter is that if the people there had embraced Western education early enough like their Southern counterparts, at least some of the things happening in the North would not have happened and they are affecting them now.
For instance, one of the reasons Sanusi was removed as Emir was because he stood against some of the things happening there and he was on the side of the masses. The man saw what other people couldn’t see. When he was in court contesting the deposition matter, he won up till the Court of Appeal and the matter was in court, they went ahead and deposed him.
When we were defending him, on about five occasions, we saw armies of uneducated, unemployed youths who came to his palace to eat breakfast and thereafter left the palace with bowls in their hands to the streets. They came back in the evening and it was the same thing every day. That was the setting there and he could not stomach it.
He told us of a time they wanted to launch the building of a mosque, which he said became an issue between him and the Imams. They wanted to build a mosque but he said he advised them against it and suggested that they should build more schools. He said he wanted schools because there is no house in Kano that didn’t have a mosque, except if it belonged to a Christian, and that you could not travel 10 meters in Kano without coming across a mosque. He said he preferred financing mass education for the people but of course the conservative elite will not buy that. Of course the conservative elite will not have that.
