Olayinka Challenges PDP Appeal Court Claim Over Anyanwu

2027 Election Watch, Politics

Olayinka Challenges PDP Appeal Court Claim Over Anyanwu

Lere Olayinka’s intervention on ARISE Newsnight has thrown fresh fuel on the PDP’s widening legal and political firestorm. His central claim is blunt: the appeal court judgement, he insists, did not name Sam Anyanwu at all. Instead, he says the real issue was who had lawful authority to speak for the party in court, with…

Atlantic Post

May 11, 2026

3–4 minutes

Arise Newsnight, Court of Appeal, Lere Olayinka, Nigerian Politics, PDP Crisis, Sam Anyanwu

ARISE News pushed the interview across its platforms under the headline, “There Was No Mention Of Sam Anyanwu In The Appeal Court Judgement — Olayinka,” signalling yet another sharp turn in the People’s Democratic Party’s already toxic internal war.

The clip, published on ARISE’s YouTube and social channels, placed Lere Olayinka at the centre of a dispute that is no longer just political, but deeply procedural and legal.

At the heart of Olayinka’s argument is his insistence that the real issue before the court was not Samuel Anyanwu’s personal standing, but who had the authority to speak for the PDP in court.

As he put it, “The national legal adviser Ajibade SAN presented himself before the court as the one constitutionally empowered by the PDP to represent them.”

He added that “The NWC suspended Ajibade and others on 1st of November 2025 for a period of 30 days. Naturally, he’s to resume once the 30 days elapses.”

In other words, Olayinka is presenting the matter as one of timing, mandate and party procedure rather than a definitive judicial endorsement of Anyanwu’s faction.

That position matters because, inside the PDP, the battle is not merely about personalities. It is about which organ of the party can claim legitimacy, who controls the legal machinery, and whether a suspended officer can still anchor the party’s case in court.

The PDP constitution places day-to-day administration in the hands of the National Working Committee, while also providing for disciplinary sanctions, including suspension.

That makes Olayinka’s 30-day argument politically significant, because if his timeline is accepted, the suspension he referenced would have expired and the legal adviser’s status would need to be reassessed.

The broader legal backdrop is even messier. On 9 March 2026, the Court of Appeal in Abuja upheld the Federal High Court decisions that invalidated the PDP’s Ibadan convention and barred INEC from recognising its outcome.

Premium Times reported that the disputed convention had suspended several Wike-aligned figures, including Samuel Anyanwu and Kamaldeen Ajibade, and that the Court of Appeal dismissed the appeals brought by the Turaki faction.

The court also held that the case was not simply an internal party affair and rejected attempts to reframe what it described as a constitutional breach.

That is why Olayinka’s categorical claim that there was no mention of Anyanwu in the appeal court judgment is politically explosive. It directly challenges the way many party actors have been reading the same legal file.

Just as important, later reporting by Premium Times on 1 May 2026 said the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling upheld the suspension of Samuel Anyanwu, Umar Bature and Kamaldeen Ajibade, and that the PDP Board of Trustees used that judgment as the basis to assume leadership and seek an interim NWC.

The result is a party with rival camps citing different layers of the same litigation to legitimise themselves.

In practical terms, Olayinka is trying to narrow the dispute to procedure. His argument is that even if the larger party war continues, the court should not be treated as having endorsed a claim that is unsupported by the actual judgment text.

That is a familiar tactic in Nigerian intra-party litigation: reduce the fight to who was properly authorised, who was validly suspended, who could file what, and whether the correct organ acted at the correct time.

In this reading, the real fight is not only over leadership, but over who has the power to make the court listen.

For the PDP, the danger is that every new judgment now becomes ammunition for another faction. Olayinka’s remarks on ARISE Newsnight show how the party’s internal crisis has moved far beyond rhetoric and into a full-scale contest over constitutional authority, legal representation and control of the narrative.

What should have been a narrow argument about standing has become another chapter in a long-running struggle that could shape how the party approaches 2027.