PDP Crisis Deepens as Appeal Court Knocks Ibadan Ruling

2027 Election Watch, Breaking News, Politics

PDP Crisis Deepens as Appeal Court Knocks Ibadan Ruling

The Court of Appeal has dealt the PDP another humiliating blow, blasting the Ibadan ruling as a judicial overreach and stripping the disputed caretaker structure of its legal cover after the Supreme Court had already knocked out the convention on which it stood.

Atlantic Post

June 5, 2026

4–7 minutes

Abdurahman Mohammed, Court of Appeal, Ibadan convention, Justice Uche Agomoh, PDP Crisis, Samuel Anyanwu

The Court of Appeal in Abuja has delivered another bruising setback to the Peoples Democratic Party’s leadership camp, faulting a Federal High Court ruling in Ibadan that recognised an Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu aligned caretaker structure as the party’s legitimate leadership.

The appellate court said the trial judge went beyond the case placed before the court by granting reliefs that none of the parties had asked for, while also leaning on a convention already struck down by the Supreme Court.

The decision, delivered on Wednesday by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam and backed unanimously by Justices Mohammed Mustapha and Okon Abang, is the latest judicial turn in a bitter PDP crisis that has repeatedly dragged the party’s internal battle into the courts.

According to the certified true copy reported by the press, the appeal arose from the January 30 judgment of Justice Uche Agomoh of the Federal High Court, Ibadan, which had recognised the factional caretaker committee as the party’s lawful leadership bloc.

Trial Court Crossed The Line

At the heart of the appellate court’s concern was a basic but decisive legal point. The Court of Appeal said the Ibadan court had ventured beyond the reliefs sought by the litigants and effectively handed down a declaration that was not prayed for. Justice Onyemenam’s lead judgment stated that there was “a live issue” because the lower court “went outside the reliefs sought” to recognise and uphold a factional caretaker committee.

That criticism is crucial because Nigerian appellate courts have long treated reliefs not sought as a serious jurisdictional defect.

The Court of Appeal’s language was stark. It described the offending portions of the judgment as “a nullity liable to be set aside ex debito justitiae”, meaning the error was so fundamental that the law itself required the decision to be undone.

The ruling also undercuts any argument that the trial court was merely resolving a political stalemate for the sake of party stability.

The appellate panel’s position was that a court cannot create or validate a leadership arrangement that no litigant actually asked it to create.

In effect, the court rejected the idea that judicial discretion can be stretched to fill a vacuum in a party’s internal crisis.

Supreme Court Ruling Changes Everything

The second pillar of the appellate court’s reasoning was even more damaging to the Abdurahman Mohammed camp.

The Court of Appeal said the legal foundation of the Ibadan ruling had already been removed by the Supreme Court, which nullified the PDP’s Ibadan convention held on November 15 and 16, 2025.

Once that convention was voided, the appellate court held, any leadership organ said to have emerged from it had no surviving legal basis.

The Supreme Court’s own record, as reproduced in the law report published by ThisDay, shows that the apex court found the convention “null, void and of no effect” because the party proceeded in defiance of a subsisting order restraining it from conducting the exercise until nomination access was regularised.

The judgment summary further records that the appeal was dismissed by majority decision, while the cross appeal also failed.

That background is crucial. It means the Court of Appeal was not deciding the PDP leadership question in a vacuum. It was operating in a legal landscape where the very convention used to justify the disputed leadership structure had already been wiped out by the apex court.

The appellate judges said it would have been pointless to order a retrial on issues tied to an event that no longer had legal life.

Why The Judgment Matters For The PDP

For the PDP, the practical effect is severe. The court’s reasoning removes the remaining judicial cover for the caretaker arrangement tied to the Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu faction.

The Federal High Court had earlier tried to place that bloc at the centre of the party’s recognised structure, but the Court of Appeal has now dismantled that legal footing as well.

Politically, that deepens a leadership vacuum the party has struggled to contain since the fallout over its national convention.

The dispute has exposed the PDP to a familiar but costly pattern in Nigerian party politics, where internal contests are not settled by consensus but by successive rounds of litigation that eventually hand decisive power to the courts.

In this case, the courts have now spoken in layers, first at the Supreme Court level and then again on appeal.

The wider warning in the ruling is just as important as the immediate outcome. The Court of Appeal made clear that once a superior court has settled the foundation of a dispute, a lower court cannot revive that issue through a different route or by recasting the reliefs.

In plain terms, the judiciary has signalled that party factions cannot use fresh filings to reanimate a structure already pronounced dead at the apex level.

For a party preparing for future elections and still trying to project internal coherence, this is a serious blow. It suggests that the courtroom path, while often used as a strategic weapon in Nigerian party battles, can also backfire when the legal foundation of a faction is weak or already extinguished.

In the PDP’s case, the latest appellate ruling leaves its leadership crisis more exposed, more uncertain and more deeply entangled in judicial pronouncements than ever before.

Courtroom Language, Political Consequences

The most important line in the judgment may be the simplest: once a convention has been declared void by the Supreme Court, “any superstructure erected upon it” cannot stand.

That sentence captures the entire trajectory of this dispute. It is not merely about one judge’s error in Ibadan. It is about the collapse of an entire legal framework built on a convention the apex court has already erased.

The Court of Appeal’s unanimous stance ensures that this will not be read as a narrow procedural correction. It is a substantive rebuke, one that goes to the root of the PDP’s ongoing leadership war and leaves the party’s rival blocs with even less room to claim court-backed legitimacy.

For now, the message from Abuja is unambiguous: courts cannot confer what the law has already taken away.