ON the surface, the March 31 judgement of a High Court in Ondo State ordering the dissolution of the 18 local governments sworn in by former governor Olusegun Mimiko should not raise eyebrows. It however does. The case was originally instituted by Balarabe Musa’s Peoples Redemption Party (PRP), but long since abandoned because the reason for going to court, non-inclusion in the ballot in last year’s local government poll, had been resolved. Someone, somewhere, some say agents of the new All Progressives Congress (APC) Rotimi Akeredolu government, revived the case and asked for the LGs to be dissolved.
Alerted to the case, the PRP chairman and the party’s lawyer, Femi Aborishade, and other party supporters thronged the court to confirm that they had discontinued the case, and that in any case, they should be heard. Justice S.A. Sadiq, however, reportedly disregarded the PRP leaders and their lawyer, and chose to recognise another lawyer claiming to represent the party, one Segun Agodo, a stranger to the case. The PRP, which had participated in the election, insisted it had no reason to ask for the LGs dissolution, but the court went ahead anyway. Indeed, it was the APC that had boycotted the election last year, though the party’s name and symbol were on the ballot. It had claimed that it had a case pending in court questioning the composition of the state electoral body, OSIEC.
Immediately the court dissolved the LGs on March 31, though their tenure was to expire in April 2019, the state government announced new caretaker chairmen. Earlier, however, the 18 chairmen, all of whom belonged to the PDP and feared what injury the new APC government was capable of inflicting, had gone to court to bar the government from sacking the LGs. The former Chief Judge of the state, Justice Olasehinde Kumuyi, assented to their request and barred the government from interfering with the councils. But the APC was reported in February to have appealed Justice Kumuyi’s January 17 decision and was waiting for its determination when the idea of reviving the PRP case occurred to some bright minds in the APC. The government’s lawyers, however, said they were not aware of the case, let alone any appeal. But in March, the government had frozen the accounts of the LGs. Eventually, not even the PRP was allowed to have a say in the case they were purported to have filed, a case both the PRP chairman and lawyer had said was overtaken by their participation in the LG poll.
The manner the Ondo State government cleverly tweaked the legal process, and the collusion of the judiciary among other insalubrious measures, probably prompted Mallam Musa to suggest that the APC had become a fascist government far worse than the incompetent PDP government it replaced. Few Nigerians will disagree with the PRP national chairman.
