Polities: You Can’t Appoint Council Officials Mr Governor Says Court

An Ado Ekiti High Court has ruled that the state governor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, does not have the constitutional power to appoint key officials of local governments in the state.

Justice Isaac Ogunyemi had, in his ruling on Monday, said the governor did not have the power to appoint secretaries, personal assistants and supervisors for the local governments.

Ogunyemi gave the ruling in a suit filed by a Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain, Mr. Samuel Ajide Olayemi, challeng the constitutionality or otherwise of the Ekiti State Local Government Administration (Amendment) Law 2011 passed by the House of Assembly last year.

The court ruled that the amended law contravened Sections 7(1), 1(1), 4(7), 40, 192 and 208 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and as such be nullified.

Olayemi, a chairmanship candidate of the PDP in the Moba Council area in the botched February 4, local government election, had gone to court to challenge the law, positing that it was autocratic in nature.

Alongside Fayemi, the Speaker of the state House of Assembly, the Attorney- General of the state and the Ekiti State Independent Electoral Commission were joined as respondents in the matter.

The petitioner had in the suit also urged the court to see the law as vexatious and antithetical to democratic norms and thereby be set aside.

Olayemi’s lawyers, Obafemi Adewale and Company, had told the court that the passage of the bill and the subsequent assent by the governor had rubbished the integrity of the Assembly and portrayed it as incompetent.

Speaking in a chat with journalists in Ado Ekiti yesterday, Olayemi, a former member of the old Ondo State House of Assembly, urged the state legislators to always stand by the truth while performing their statutory duties and should stop dragging the name of the state in the mud.

His words: “This thing sounds odious. How can an ACN governor assume the power to appoint secretary, supervisory councillors and other officials for a chairman elected on the platform of the Labour Party or the PDP?

“There is no way such governor will appoint these people from other opposition parties, aside his own. So we salute the courage of the judiciary for this landmark judgment and I know that it will go a long way in bringing sanity into governance.

“Let us examine the situation critically, how would Fayemi feel if he wakes up one day and learn that President Goodluck Jonathan will be the one to appoint his commissioners, special advisers, special assistants and others? He should know that the step he took was wrong and he must correct it immediately,” he said.