“THE owl wakes us,” wrote the Nigerian poet Tanure Ojaide in the epochal poem of that same title, “from a nightmare/And we greet our saviours/With songs.” Emmanuel Agim, Justice of the Supreme Court, gave life to these lines once again this week: “Demands of justice require a progressive interpretation of the law. It is the position of this court that the federation can pay LGA allocations to the LGAs directly or pay them through the states.
In this case, since paying them through states has not worked, justice of this case demands that LGA allocations from the federation account should henceforth be paid directly to the LGAs.” If this judgment had been given in a clime like the United States, it would have drawn fierce criticism from conservatives, most of whom subscribe to a textualist, not progressive, view of the constitution. Textualism implies that you interpret the law in the spirit in which it was written, regardless of your personal feelings.
In this case, a progressive judge has invalidated the express provisions of Nigeria’s constitution which mandates that LG allocations be shared through the Joint Accounts Allocations Committee (JAAC). Supreme Courts get away with this kind of activism, but the law is clear on who has the power to change the law: the legislature. But what gave rise to JAAC in the first place? Well, the progressivism versus textualism debate is not popular in Nigeria, and so I guess Agim and his team are on safe ground.
Since the Sup.
