By
Unknown Author
To start with, the Supreme Court rightly ruled in 2004 that Mr. President has no power under the Constitution to unilaterally withhold the allocation of a state.
So what happened in 2004?
Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos State created some additional 37 LGAs to increase Local Governments in Lagos State to 57 from 20. Obasanjo disagreed and ordered him to revert back to 20 since the additional 37 were not listed in the Constitution. Tinubu disagreed but changed the name to LCDAs.
Obasanjo then ordered the Minister of Finance and CBN Governor not to release the Local Government allocation of Lagos State until the new LGA/LCDAS are scrapped.
Tinubu went to court and the then CJN, Hon Justice Uwais, ruled that Mr. President does not have the power under the law to unilaterally stop the allocation of any state without a court order.
Justice Uwais said: Next is the question whether the President of FRN was right to direct the Minister of Finance not to release statutory allocations from the Federation account to the states which created new LGAs. The CJN then said, the President has no such power. COURT is the only authority that can ORDER A STOPPAGE OF FUNDS TO ANY AGENCY”.
In the case of Rivers State, Mr. President did not give anybody any order to withhold or stop the allocation of the state. Elected lawmakers from Rivers State approached the Federal High court to determine the legality of the state’s 2024 budget passed by 5 members out of 32.
The Federal High Court ruled that the budget was not legally passed and should be represented to the full house for passage as required by the Constitution.
The judgement was also reaffirmed by the Appeal Court. Instead of Governor Fubara to obey the court judgement, he opted to disregard the judgement and continue with the implementation of an illegal budget.
Following the Governor’s disregard of a valid court judgement, the lawmakers again approached a federal high court to get an order to stop the CBN and Minister of Finance from further releasing Rivers state funds to the Governor since the state budget he is implementing has been invalidated by a court of competent jurisdiction. The Court agreed with the lawmakers’ opinion that releasing further allocation to the Governor would amount to encouraging unconstitutionality and disregard for rule of law. The court then gave an order stopping the Minister of Finance, Accountant General of the Federation and the CBN governor from further releasing allocation to Rivers state till a proper budget is passed into law.
Again, let me also state that CBN was a party to the case and they objected to the relief sought by the plaintiffs. That is, they supported Rivers State Government’s position that the court should not grant the order to withhold or stop the allocation. The court in its wisdom overruled the objection of CBN.
So, it’s very clear that there is a huge difference between what happened in 2004 and the recent court judgement in respect of Rivers State allocation. President Tinubu did not issue any order to stop the release of funds to Rivers State because he has no such powers. In fact, he objected to the order through CBN but was overruled.
The order was issued by a court of competent jurisdiction and until it is set aside by a superior court, it remains valid and enforceable. Instead of trying to blackmail Mr. President with a decision he’s not even a party to, we should all encourage the Governor to do the right thing by obeying the judgement of the Appeal Court.
