A Deputy Governor Was Owed Over ₦1 Billion — But the Court That Said So Couldn't Actually Award It: Gov., Kogi State & Anor. v. Elder Achuba Simon [2026] 11 NWLR 321 (SC)

 

A Deputy Governor Was Owed Over ₦1 Billion — But the Court That Said So Couldn't Actually Award It

Case: Gov., Kogi State & Anor. v. Elder Achuba Simon [2026] 11 NWLR 321 (SC) Court: Supreme Court of Nigeria (4–1 majority, Ogbuinya, J.S.C. dissenting)

Winning a case doesn't always mean winning the money. This 2026 decision is a striking example of a party who had already been told, by two courts, that he was owed a huge sum — only to have the actual payment order struck down, not because the money wasn't due, but because of which court tried to hand it to him. It's a case about the difference between declaring a right and enforcing one, and it split the Supreme Court itself.

A Deputy Governor's Unpaid Entitlements

Elder Achuba Simon served as Deputy Governor of Kogi State. During his tenure, he said, the state government withheld a range of benefits that came with the office — salaries, travel allowances, security votes, monthly imprest, and other statutory allocations. He sued at the National Industrial Court, seeking declarations that he was entitled to these benefits, that withholding them was discriminatory and amounted to unfair labour practice, and an order directing the government to pay him the sum he calculated was owed: over ₦921 million.

The trial court partly agreed. It declared him entitled to salaries, travel allowances, security costs, and most of the statutory allocations (though not the monthly imprest), held that the government had no authority to withhold his remuneration, and awarded him ₦170 million specifically for security votes.

Both sides were unhappy with parts of that outcome. The government appealed; Simon cross-appealed, challenging some evidentiary rulings and the trial court's refusal to grant certain other monetary claims. The Court of Appeal allowed the government's appeal in part, dismissed Simon's cross-appeal entirely, and — critically — while it affirmed that Simon was indeed entitled to the salaries, allowances, and allocations in principle, it set aside the ₦170 million award and didn't replace it with any other specific figure. Under Nigeria's constitutional framework, that was the end of the appellate road for this dispute — decisions of the Court of Appeal in matters arising from the National Industrial Court's civil jurisdiction are final, with no further appeal to the Supreme Court.

The Second Round: A Motion for the Actual Money

With a declaration of entitlement in hand but no specific sum attached to it, Simon did his own math. He calculated that ₦1,070,860,138 was owed to him in unpaid salaries, allowances, and allocations from the 2017 and 2018 state budgets. His lawyers wrote to the government demanding payment. The government's response was blunt: the Court of Appeal hadn't actually awarded him anything specific, so there was nothing to pay.

Rather than starting fresh at the National Industrial Court, Simon went back to the Court of Appeal itself, filing a motion asking it to order payment of that exact sum, plus 10% post-judgment interest. The government opposed the motion, arguing this was effectively a brand new lawsuit dressed up as a simple follow-up request — and that the reliefs being sought went well beyond anything the court had actually decided the first time around.

The Court of Appeal disagreed with the government. It held that the motion was a legitimate post-judgment application, that it hadn't lost the power to deal with the matter (a concept known as being "functus officio"), and that it shared concurrent jurisdiction with the trial court to enforce its own judgment. It accepted Simon's calculation and ordered the government to pay the full amount.

The government, aggrieved, appealed to the Supreme Court.

A Preliminary Fight Before the Real Fight

Simon tried to head the appeal off entirely. He argued that since his underlying case originated from the National Industrial Court's civil jurisdiction, the constitutional provision making Court of Appeal decisions in such matters final should apply here too — meaning the Supreme Court had no business hearing this appeal at all.

The government's counter was that this later ruling wasn't really part of the original appellate chain. It argued the constitutional finality provision only bites when the Court of Appeal is reviewing a trial court's judgment on appeal — and here, the Court of Appeal had instead been asked to determine, apparently for the first time, a completely new monetary figure that had never actually been part of its earlier judgment. That, the government said, made this a fresh proceeding capable of being appealed further, not a mere continuation of the earlier appeal.

How the Supreme Court Handled the Preliminary Objection

Rather than resolving this jurisdictional question upfront and separately — which is the usual approach — the majority decided something more unusual: it found that the preliminary objection and the substantive appeal were so tightly bound together that answering one required answering the other. Whether the Court of Appeal's ruling on the payment motion counted as part of the earlier appeal, or as something new, was itself the central question the whole appeal turned on. Deciding that question in a preliminary skirmish would have meant deciding the entire case without actually hearing it properly. So the Court folded the objection into the main judgment, to be resolved together with everything else — reasoning that a preliminary objection exists to weed out proceedings that genuinely have no business being in court, not to become a tool for shutting down a proper appeal before anyone's actually heard it out.

The Court's Reasoning on the Merits

Declaring a Right and Enforcing It Are Different Things

The foundation of the majority's reasoning is a distinction that matters well beyond this specific case: a declaratory judgment and an executory one are not the same animal. A declaration simply states what the law is or confirms that a right exists — it carries no direct command telling anyone to do anything, and so it can't be enforced through ordinary execution processes. An executory judgment, by contrast, imposes a positive obligation — pay this sum, hand over this property, do or stop doing this thing — and the law equips it with established machinery to actually enforce it.

The Court of Appeal's earlier judgment sat firmly in the first category. It confirmed Simon was entitled to salaries, allowances, and allocations, but it never fixed a specific figure — in fact, it had gone out of its way to strike down the ₦170 million the trial court had awarded, without substituting any number of its own. That left Simon holding a confirmed right, but not yet an enforceable judgment sum.

Who Actually Gets to Turn a Declaration Into a Number?

This is where the constitutional architecture came in. The Constitution gives the Court of Appeal specifically defined original jurisdiction (limited to presidential election disputes) and appellate jurisdiction (hearing appeals from a list of named courts, including the National Industrial Court). Outside those defined lanes, the Court of Appeal simply doesn't have jurisdiction — a court's authority has to be traced back to something the Constitution or a statute actually gave it, not to how reasonable or well-intentioned a particular course of action might seem in the moment.

The majority also read a specific provision governing how Court of Appeal decisions get enforced, and found it did real work here: enforcement of Court of Appeal decisions is expressly assigned to courts subordinate to it — not to the Court of Appeal itself. The people who wrote the Constitution didn't want the same court both deciding an appeal and then being the one to chase down payment on it — those two jobs were handed to different levels of the court system on purpose. Reading that provision as somehow authorizing the Court of Appeal to convert its own declaratory ruling into a specific, executable monetary figure would mean stretching the Constitution's actual words well past what they say.

Since Simon's underlying claim was fundamentally an employment dispute, the correctly positioned court to hear witnesses, weigh the rival figures each side put forward, and land on an actual number was the National Industrial Court — the trial-level court built for exactly that job — not the Court of Appeal reaching backward to finish a job it had never been asked, or empowered, to do in the first place.

A "Post-Judgment Application" Has Limits Too

The Court of Appeal had justified its own actions by treating Simon's motion as a legitimate post-judgment application — the kind of housekeeping request courts routinely handle after a judgment (correcting clerical errors, clarifying ambiguous wording, enforcing an already-clear order, and so on). The majority didn't dispute that such applications are generally valid; the problem was classifying this one as falling into that category.

The test the Court articulated is a functional one, not a formal one: what matters isn't the label stuck on an application, but what it actually asks the court to do. A request that merely implements or clarifies something the court already decided is genuinely ancillary. But a request that asks the court to determine substantive rights it never previously ruled on, or to freshly evaluate facts and competing figures to arrive at a number that never existed before, has stopped being a housekeeping matter — it's a new adjudication wearing a post-judgment costume.

Simon's motion, on the majority's reading, was squarely the second kind. The Court of Appeal had never assessed or fixed the ₦1.07 billion figure in its earlier judgment; asking it to do so now meant asking it to adjudicate something entirely new. That made it, in substance, an originating claim rather than a follow-up request — and once cast in that light, it was well outside what the Court of Appeal had power to grant.

Functus Officio: Why the Court of Appeal Couldn't Just Pick the Job Back Up

Tying this together, the majority invoked the doctrine of functus officio — the principle that once a court has finally discharged its duty on a matter, it generally loses the authority to revisit the substance of that dispute. A court in that position retains only narrow residual powers: correcting genuine clerical slips, clarifying ambiguous wording, that sort of thing. It can't reopen the underlying merits or invent a new figure it never previously decided. Since the Court of Appeal's earlier judgment never actually fixed Simon's monetary entitlement, going back and inserting a brand-new number afterward stepped well outside that narrow residual lane. Where a final judgment needs correcting or has a genuine defect, the doctrine's whole purpose is to channel that correction through an appeal to a higher court — not through the same court reopening its own case.

The Dissent: A Different Reading of the Same Facts

Ogbuinya, J.S.C. saw the situation differently, and it's worth understanding why, since it shows how genuinely close this question was.

The dissent agreed that functus officio is a real doctrine, but argued it's a flexible one that has never barred courts from handling a whole category of legitimate post-judgment applications — including applications to enforce a judgment. Read as a whole, Simon's reliefs all orbited around one goal: enforcing the Court of Appeal's earlier decision. On that reading, the motion wasn't a disguised fresh action at all, but a textbook example of a party trying to get an already-established right actually honoured — squarely within the Court of Appeal's own limited but real appellate powers.

Following that reasoning to its natural conclusion, the dissent held that the constitutional finality provision did apply, since the ruling being appealed was, in its view, still part of the appellate chain arising from the original National Industrial Court dispute. That meant, in the dissent's assessment, the Supreme Court had no jurisdiction to hear this appeal at all, and it should have been struck out on that basis alone.

Final Verdict

By a 4–1 majority, the Supreme Court allowed the appeal, holding that the Court of Appeal had acted without jurisdiction when it quantified and awarded the ₦1,070,860,138 sum through a post-judgment motion. The proper route for Simon to actually recover a specific figure was to pursue quantification before the National Industrial Court — the court constitutionally equipped to receive evidence and determine the monetary entitlement in the first place.

Key Takeaways

• A declaration of entitlement isn't the same as an enforceable judgment sum. Winning a declaratory ruling confirms a right exists; it doesn't, by itself, give you a specific number you can go and collect.
• Courts can't expand their own jurisdiction through good intentions. Even a court genuinely trying to give practical effect to its own earlier ruling can still act outside its constitutional authority if it crosses into territory reserved for another court.
• Not every "post-judgment application" is really just housekeeping. If a motion asks a court to determine something it never actually decided before, courts will look past the label and treat it as a fresh claim requiring the right forum.
• Functus officio has real teeth, but narrow exceptions. A court that has finally ruled on a matter generally can't revisit its substance — genuine defects get fixed on appeal to a higher court, not by going back to the same court for a do-over.
• Even experienced appellate judges can read the same facts differently. This case is a useful reminder that questions about jurisdiction and the scope of "enforcement" versus "fresh adjudication" aren't always clear-cut, even at the highest level.

Test

1. What was the core legal issue decided by the supreme court in the case ?
2. Why did the supreme court determine that the court of appeal lacked jurisdiction to grant the monetary award?
3. How did the supreme court characterise the respondent's post-judgment application for the monetary award?