Who Runs the Local Government?

Attorney-General of the Federation v. Attorney-General of Abia State & 35 Ors.—SC/CV/343/2024 | (2024) LPELR-62576(SC) | Judgment delivered July 11, 2024

A note before we begin.

If the case name above looks familiar, it should. We have been here before—sort of.

Back in 2002, the Supreme Court decided a case called Attorney-General of the Federation v. Attorney-General of Abia State & 35 Ors, and if you have been following this series, you may remember it. That case was about oil: specifically, who owned the offshore oil wells sitting beyond Nigeria's coastline and whether revenue from those wells triggered the 13% derivation formula under section 162(2) of the 1999 Constitution.

The Federal Government won, the littoral states lost, and the National Assembly reversed the practical effect of the judgment two years later through legislation.

This is not that case, although you would be forgiven for thinking so.

Same plaintiff. Same defendants. Same court. Completely different subject matter, because the parties to disputes about Nigerian federalism are, almost by definition, always going to be the same people. The Federal Government and the 36 state attorneys-general are the only parties who can invoke the Supreme Court's original jurisdiction under section 232(1) of the Constitution, so whenever there is a constitutional fight about how power or money moves across the federation, you will see this caption.

Keep that in mind as you read, because the 2024 case raises questions that are, in some ways, even more fundamental than who owns the oil.

This one is about who runs the local government.

The Setup

Nigeria's 1999 Constitution establishes three tiers of government: federal, state, and local. That much is clear. What has never been clear, at least not in practice, is whether the third tier is actually a tier at all, or simply an extension of whichever governor happens to be in power in a given state.

The problem had two connected parts.

The first is democratic. Section 7(1) of the Constitution guarantees the existence of democratically elected local government councils in every state. It is not a suggestion. Governors do not have the constitutional authority to dissolve elected councils and replace them with caretaker committees of their own choosing.

The Supreme Court had said this repeatedly over the years, in case after case, and governors had largely ignored it anyway, appointing caretakers whenever it suited them and holding elections on their own timetable. By 2024, several states had been running on caretaker committees for years.

The second problem is financial. Section 162 of the Constitution establishes the Federation Account, into which all federal revenues are paid, and sections 162(5) and (6) provide that local governments are entitled to their share. In practice, this money did not go directly to local governments. It went into a state joint local government account, controlled by the state government, and from there to the local governments—eventually, partially, and at the discretion of whoever was holding the keys.

Governors diverted these funds routinely, sometimes for state projects, sometimes for political patronage, sometimes for reasons that were never explained to anyone. Local governments, constitutionally designed to be the tier of government closest to ordinary Nigerians, were effectively broke and at the mercy of state executives who had every incentive to keep them that way.

The Federal Government filed suit on May 24, 2024. The Attorney-General of the Federation, Prince Lateef Fagbemi SAN, brought an originating summons before the Supreme Court on behalf of the federation, with 15 questions for determination and a battery of reliefs targeting both the democratic and financial dimensions of the problem.

In Court

A full court was convened. Seven justices sat on the panel, presided over by Hon. Justice Mohammed Garba. Justice Emmanuel Agim delivered the lead judgment, with Justices Nwosu-Iheme, Tsamani, Adumein, and Tukur concurring. Justice Habeeb Adewale Abiru dissented.

The states raised preliminary objections, as states tend to do when the Federal Government is asking uncomfortable questions about how they spend money. As was the case in our previously discussed 2002 case, the court dismissed all preliminary objections raised by the states.

The AGF's standing to bring the action was upheld as the court held that the Attorney-General of the Federation, as chief law officer of the federation, was statutorily qualified to institute the action on behalf of local governments. The court also confirmed its original jurisdiction under section 232(1) of the Constitution to hear the matter.

On the substance, the states' central argument was essentially that the existing arrangement was constitutional, that the State Joint Local Government Account was a lawful mechanism, and that state governments had the authority to manage local government funds as they saw fit. Several states filed affidavit evidence in support of this position.

Justice Abiru, in his dissent, found that this evidence was sufficient to show that local governments had in fact been paid their allocations and that the majority had departed from established principles on the weight to be given to documentary evidence supporting affidavit depositions.

The majority was not persuaded.

The Decision

Judgment was delivered on July 11, 2024, and the court ruled comprehensively in favor of the Federal Government.

On the democratic question, the court affirmed what it had been saying for years with new force: state governors have no constitutional authority to dissolve democratically elected local government councils and replace them with caretaker committees.

Section 7(1) of the Constitution is clear, and any state law purporting to grant governors such power is inconsistent with the Constitution and void to that extent. The court went further, ordering that where a state has no democratically elected local government system in place, the funds due to local governments from the Federation Account cannot be released to or through that state government at all.

That next part of the judgment however, is the one which holds the most weight and was definitely the most controversial.

On the financial question, the court held that the funds allocated to local governments from the Federation Account belong to the local governments, not to the states. The State Joint Local Government Account mechanism, as it had been operated in practice, was unconstitutional to the extent that it allowed state governments to receive, control, or divert funds meant for local governments.

The court directed that the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission, through FAAC, must now pay local government allocations directly into the accounts of democratically elected local government councils, bypassing state governments entirely.

For the 774 local government councils across Nigeria, this was, on paper, a complete restructuring of how money would flow to them every month.

The Controversy

The judgment was celebrated loudly in some quarters and condemned just as loudly in others, and both reactions were understandable.

The reason for the celebration was straightforward. Local governments have been starved and subordinated for decades. The constitutional promise of a functional third tier of government had become something of a running joke, with councils unable to pay salaries, fix roads, or provide basic services because the money allocated to them never arrived intact. The court's ruling, if implemented, would change that.

The criticism came from two directions. Some state governments—particularly those with strong political machines built partly on the patronage that local government funds enable, were unhappy, with Yoruba pressure group Afenifere going so far as to describe the judgment as a conspiracy against democracy, an interesting framing for a decision that is, at its core, about making local elections matter.

The more substantive legal criticism, reflected in Justice Abiru's dissent and taken up by several commentators, is that the majority arguably stretched its interpretive role, adopting a purposive approach to constitutional provisions where a literal reading might have supported a different outcome.

The court, critics argued, had crossed from interpretation into legislation, which was the same line Justice Kutigi had warned about in the 2002 oil case.

It is a fair tension. Nigerian constitutionalism has always had to navigate the gap between what the Constitution says and what the Constitution is supposed to achieve, and reasonable jurists can disagree about when a court is filling that gap and when it is widening it.

What Happened After

Implementation has been, predictably, uneven. Several states that had been running on caretaker committees moved to conduct local government elections in the months following the judgment, unwilling to risk their federal allocations.

Others have found workarounds, continuing to exert control over councils through informal mechanisms that do not technically violate the letter of the judgment. SERAP and civil society groups called on governors to account for funds already diverted before the ruling. Nobody has done so.

As of 2026, the judgment has changed the formal architecture of local government finance, but whether it has changed the reality on the ground is a different question. The Supreme Court can declare what the law is; it cannot, by itself, make governors govern well.

Why It Matters

The local government question is ultimately a question about whether Nigerian democracy reaches the places where most Nigerians actually live. Federal politics is visible and loud. State politics has its own energy. But the road outside your house, the primary health centre in your ward, the market that needs a fence and drainage… all that is local government work, and for most of its existence the third tier has been too broke and too captured to do it.

The 2024 judgment, whatever its doctrinal controversies, is an attempt by the Supreme Court to take that seriously. It joins a growing body of jurisprudence, from the earlier cases on caretaker committees to this decision on direct funding, that treats local government autonomy not as a political preference but as a constitutional requirement.

Whether the political class agrees is, as usual, a separate matter entirely.

What this does mean for you as a citizen as well is that you are now even more empowered to hold your local government accountable, as they are now the direct recipients of funding from the federal government. Whatever they do with these funds should not be clandestine, and the only way to ensure transparency is through organized civic watchdog action by citizens and organizations.