Nigeria Newspapers Online

Chidi Odinkalu, a Professor of Practice in International Human Rights Law at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, has said that local government allocation will still go back to state governors.

Odinkalu stated this while commenting on the Supreme Court judgement on Channels TV’s Politics Today Thursday night.

The Supreme Court had on Thursday delivered judgment in the suit instituted by the Federal Government against the 36 state governors on local government autonomy.

But reacting to the judgment, Odinkalu said that the judgment would only alter the means through which the governors get the funds, as they install local government chairmen in rigged elections.

He said, “A local chairman who has been installed in a rigged election controlled entirely by the governor will give the fund back to the governor. What this person is going to do is to collect the money and hand it back to the governor. So, all they are doing is altering the sequence by which the money will go back to the governor. But the money still goes back to the governor.

“And the reason the money will go back to the governor is because the mandate as a matter of jurisprudence set up by the Supreme Court is not with the people. The mandate is in the politicians’ hands. Until we address this, we are wasting time and efforts.

“If they said that they will not give money to caretaker chairmen, the president (Bola Tinubu) went through the same thing with Obasanjo. Obasanjo held up their money when he (Tinubu) was the governor of Lagos State. If that is the consequence they want to live with, they want to afflict others with, we live by the swing of the pendulum. It may take one decade or 20 years, but it will turn around.”