The Court of Appeal in Abuja has overturned significant elements of a Federal High Court decision that recognized a factional caretaker committee in the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, arguing that the trial court granted reliefs that none of the parties to the matter requested.
In a decision delivered on Wednesday by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam, a certified true copy of which was obtained on Friday, the appellate court faulted Justice Uche Agomoh of the Federal High Court, Ibadan, for going beyond the issues raised before the court in a dispute arising from the PDP leadership crisis.
In a January 30 verdict, Justice Agomoh accepted the caretaker committee led by Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu as the party’s official leadership side.
However, the Court of Appeal ruled that none of the parties in the lower court sought such a declaration.
“In the instant case, there is clearly a live issue where the trial court went outside the reliefs sought to recognize and uphold a factional caretaker committee,” Justice Onyemenam stated.
The appellate court further ruled that the legal ground on which the Federal High Court predicated its acceptance of the committee had already been extinguished by a Supreme Court decision nullifying the PDP’s Ibadan Convention on November 15 and 16, 2025.
According to the court, any leadership structure, committee, or institution ostensibly established or recognized by the convention could not withstand the Supreme Court’s ruling.
“Once the Convention itself has been pronounced null, void, and of no effect by the Supreme Court, any superstructure erected upon it is necessarily without legal foundation,” the judgment held.
The court stated that if the Supreme Court had not intervened on the convention’s constitutionality, it would have considered ordering a retrial on problems concerning the leadership organs that arose from the exercise.
However, it found that such a move would serve no legal purpose because the substantive questions had already been resolved definitively.
Part of the judgment read, “This Court would be driven to the conclusion that the offending portions of the judgment, and indeed the judgment as a whole insofar as the excess permeates the decision, are a nullity and liable to be set aside ex debito justitiae.
“A direction to the trial court to retry an issue that has been settled at the apex level would, in effect, invite it either to repeat what has already been decided or to purport to sit in judgment over the Supreme Court, both of which the law forbids.”
The court stated that there was no longer a live dispute between the parties as a result of the Court of Appeal’s and Supreme Court’s binding decisions, which settled the essential issues at the heart of the appeal.
Justice Onyemenam’s decision was unanimously supported by the other two members of the three-man panel, Justices Mohammed Mustapha and Okon Abang.
The ruling virtually nullifies the Federal High Court’s recognition of the Abdurahman Mohammed faction’s caretaker committee, marking yet another crucial court declaration in the long-running PDP leadership crisis.
