PDP Demands Sanctions Over Court Ruling Misrepresentation

2027 Election Watch, Analysis, Politics

PDP Demands Sanctions Over Court Ruling Misrepresentation

The PDP has accused a rival camp of weaponising a Court of Appeal ruling, warning that deliberate misrepresentation of judicial pronouncements is no longer a mere party quarrel but a threat to the rule of law. At the centre of the storm is a bitter struggle over who controls the narrative, who controls the party,…

Atlantic Post

June 6, 2026

4–6 minutes

Court of Appeal, LPDC, NBA, Nigerian Judiciary, PDP Crisis, political litigation

The Peoples Democratic Party has escalated its internal war into a legal and disciplinary showdown, accusing a rival bloc of “persistent and deliberate distortion” of a Court of Appeal judgment delivered on Wednesday, 3 June 2026 and certified on Friday, 5 June 2026.

The party says the controversy is not merely political theatre but a direct attack on the credibility of the judiciary at a time when the PDP leadership crisis remains one of the most combustible battles in Nigerian opposition politics.

In the press release issued on 6 June 2026, the party said it was “deeply disturbed” by what it called false claims being circulated by a group “falsely parading themselves as the Interim National Working Committee”.

The statement, signed by National Publicity Secretary Hon. Jungudo Haruna Mohammed, described the disputed interpretation as “misleading”, “irresponsible” and “calculated to deceive the public”, while insisting that the Certified True Copy of the ruling “speaks for itself”.

The PDP also said the matter has gone beyond political disagreement and now touches on “the integrity of the judiciary and the administration of justice.”

The trigger for the latest uproar is the Court of Appeal’s ruling in Abuja, which Punch and The Guardian both reported as setting aside key parts of the Federal High Court judgment that had recognised a factional caretaker committee linked to Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu.

According to the appellate court, the trial judge went beyond the reliefs sought by the parties, a point captured in the court’s own language that “the trial court went outside the reliefs sought to recognise and uphold a factional caretaker committee.”

The Appeal Court, in the words reported by Punch, also held that the legal foundation of the lower court’s order had already been removed by the Supreme Court’s nullification of the PDP’s Ibadan convention of 15 and 16 November 2025. The court stated that once the convention had been pronounced “null, void and of no effect” by the apex court, “any superstructure erected upon it is necessarily without legal foundation”. It added that there was “no longer any live controversy between the parties” because the core issues had already been settled by the higher courts.

That is the legal terrain on which the party’s latest statement is built. But the PDP is now arguing that the real scandal lies not only in the ruling itself, but in how rival actors have allegedly repackaged it for political gain.

In the release, the party says some persons have wrongly claimed that the Court of Appeal invalidated the present National Working Committee, when, according to its reading of the CTC, the judgment did no such thing.

The party further insists that the court made no pronouncement against A.K. Ajibade, SAN, or Senator Samuel N. Anyanwu, contrary to what it describes as circulating narratives.

The PDP’s language is unusually stern. It says the conduct amounts to “a dangerous assault on the integrity of the judiciary” and warns that “politics should never descend to the level where judicial pronouncements are fraudulently twisted, manipulated, and misrepresented to serve narrow partisan interests.”

The party has therefore urged the Legal Practitioners Disciplinary Committee and the Nigerian Bar Association to investigate legal practitioners it accuses of using professional standing to spread falsehoods capable of bringing the profession into disrepute.

It also wants the relevant security and regulatory agencies to investigate the source of social media excerpts that were allegedly highlighted in green ink and presented as part of the court’s decision.

The party claims some of those passages did not emanate from the authentic Certified True Copy and says the circulation of such material is serious enough to require law-enforcement attention.

That allegation, if sustained, would turn the dispute from a factional propaganda battle into a possible forensic question about document authenticity and deliberate misinformation.

The broader backdrop is a party already fractured by months of courtroom warfare, parallel claims to authority and shifting alignments.

Earlier reporting showed that one camp around the Turaki-led bloc was publicly contesting the fallout from the Supreme Court’s April 2026 ruling, while another bloc moved to fill the vacuum by having the Board of Trustees assume leadership.

The present statement is another sign that the PDP has not merely entered a legal disagreement; it has entered a struggle over who gets to define legal truth inside the party.

For that reason, the latest press release is more than a routine rebuttal. It is a warning shot. By calling for sanctions, investigations and professional discipline, the PDP is signalling that it now sees interpretation itself as a battlefield.

The party’s closing appeal is blunt: members of the public, media houses and stakeholders should “disregard in its entirety” any narrative suggesting the Court of Appeal invalidated the present leadership.

Whether the courts will be asked to go further, or whether the disciplinary bodies will be drawn in, now depends on how aggressively the opposing camps choose to weaponise the ruling in the days ahead.

Bottom Line

This is not just a quarrel over legal language. It is a fight over control, legitimacy and narrative ownership inside a party already at war with itself. The Court of Appeal has now spoken in one direction; the PDP says some of its own critics have tried to make it speak in another. In that gap between judgment and interpretation lies the real crisis.