THIS intervention goes against the flow of current popular opinion in Nigeria. There’s a herd mentality, whereby many prominent people are hailing the recent Supreme Court ruling on local government autonomy without thinking about its implications. But as Socrates said, the correctness of an opinion cannot be determined by whether it is held by a majority or by important people. Without a doubt, I absolutely abhor the crippling of local governments by state governors.
The task before the Supreme Court, therefore, was to correct that anomaly to achieve the dual intentions of the framers of the Constitution. But the Supreme Court tilted the balance the other way; it granted financial autonomy to local governments but upended the Constitution and destroyed the principle of federalism. The Supreme Court said the constitutional arrangements were not working.
Yet, a judge’s task is to make decisions that are justified by the law as it is. As Justice Sydney Kentridge said in the judgement of the South African Constitutional Court in State v Zuma, “if the language used by the lawgiver is ignored in favour of a general resort to ‘values’, the result is not interpretation but divination.