Of Courts, Candidates And Ten Weeks To Polling Day

In Nigeria, you can win your party primary, pick your running mate, launch your campaign with drummers and a sea of branded caps, and still wake up one Thursday morning to discover that you are no longer a candidate. Welcome to election season, 2027 edition, where the most important campaign venue is not Eagle Square or the Sokoto Polo Ground. It is the courtroom.

On Thursday, November 5, Justice Peter Lifu of the Federal High Court, Abuja, sacked the David Mark-led leadership of the African Democratic Congress (ADC). The court declared its caretaker committee illegal and voided its actions. According to reports, this includes the primary that produced former Vice President Atiku Abubakar as the party’s presidential candidate, with Rotimi Amaechi as his running mate. The suit, marked FHC/ABJ/CS/1819/2025, was filed by Nafiu Bala Gombe, a former National Deputy Chairman (North-East) of the party. He argued that when the former national chairman, Ralph Nwosu, resigned, the position should have passed to him, not to Mark and Rauf Aregbesola.

The judgment came one day after Atiku flagged off his campaign in Sokoto. The presidential election is fixed for January 16, 2027. Do the arithmetic. That is about ten weeks.

Since then, confusion has been the only thing in abundance. The ADC says it has gone to the Court of Appeal and asked INEC to hold its horses. INEC says Atiku and Amaechi remain on its candidates’ portal until it receives the certified true copy of the judgment. Then Senator Dino Melaye came out to say that the certified true copy does not even mention Atiku. So, is Atiku a candidate or not? As I write this, nobody can give you a straight answer, and that is exactly the problem.

Mind you, this is not only an opposition story. Two weeks ago, on October 29, Justice Obiora Egwuatu of the same Federal High Court ruled that former governor Rochas Okorocha, not the sitting Governor Hope Uzodimma, won the APC primary for the Imo West senatorial district. The court ordered INEC to recognise Okorocha. Okorocha’s camp says he polled 150,780 votes to Uzodimma’s 102,158. Uzodimma’s counter-affidavit says he won with 230,464 votes to Okorocha’s 1,098. Same primary, same party, same state. Two sets of figures so far apart that you would think they were describing two different elections in two different countries. The governor has the right to appeal, and the matter may end up at the Supreme Court.

There is a delicious irony here which I cannot resist. Uzodimma himself became governor in January 2020 through the Supreme Court, after coming fourth at the polls. Now a court has taken away his senatorial ticket. Those who live by the gavel, as the saying should go, may also fall by the gavel. Next scene, please.

Now, let me be careful here. I am not a lawyer, and I have not read the full judgment in either case. Justice Lifu may be right on the law. Justice Egwuatu may be right on the law. That is what appellate courts are for. The ADC has alleged that the Lifu judgment was written long before it was delivered and timed to embarrass Atiku’s campaign launch. That is a weighty allegation, and the party has not offered any evidence to support it. Throwing mud at the judiciary every time you lose a case is a dangerous game, and our politicians on all sides are guilty of it.

My problem is not with any one judge. My problem is with a system that allows this kind of thing to happen ten weeks before a general election.

Look at the ADC case closely. The suit was filed in 2025. Its number says so. The party held its primary in May. Atiku has been campaigning for months as a candidate, raising money, appointing directors, printing posters and asking Nigerians to vote for him. All that time, a case that could wipe out the entire exercise was sitting in the court registry.

On July 2, Justice Musa Liman of the same Federal High Court dismissed a different suit challenging the same Mark leadership. So, we now have two judges of coordinate jurisdiction in the same court pointing in different directions on the same party’s leadership. If you are an ordinary ADC member in Gombe or Ogbomoso, who exactly is your national chairman this morning? Who signs your nomination form?

The 1999 Constitution, as amended, tried to deal with this. Section 285 says pre-election matters must be filed within 14 days of the event, decided within 180 days of filing, and any appeal decided within 60 days. The idea was simple: settle these fights before the ballot papers go to the printers, not after. Whether the ADC suit is classified as a pre-election matter or an internal leadership dispute, the result for the voter is the same. A matter that started in 2025 is now hovering over a January 2027 election like a hawk over a chicken.

And we have seen this film before. In May 2019, the Supreme Court nullified every single vote cast for the APC in Zamfara State because the party did not conduct valid primaries. The PDP, which came a distant second, took the governorship, every Senate seat, every House of Representatives seat and the State House of Assembly seats. In February 2020, the Supreme Court sacked David Lyon as governor-elect of Bayelsa State less than 24 hours before his swearing-in because of his deputy’s certificate. The people voted. The court decided. In each case, the courts were applying the law as written. But somewhere in all of this, the voter became a spectator in his own election.

To be fair to the courts, judges did not create this mess. Our political parties did. Sadly, most of our parties are not parties at all. They are special-purpose vehicles, rented for one election cycle and abandoned at the next. They do not keep proper membership registers. Their constitutions are ignored the moment they become inconvenient. Their national chairmen emerge through consensus arrangements cooked in somebody’s living room. Then the losers, who were never consulted, run to court, and they often win because the party broke its own rules.

The ADC knew its house was leaking. The coalition that adopted the party in 2025 came in with big names and big ambitions, and the leadership question was never settled cleanly. Some of us warned that a coalition built in a hurry, on a party that already had owners, would one day meet those owners in court. That day has come. You cannot lie on a mat that is still being woven and blame the mat when it tears.

Still, the bigger question is not about Atiku or Okorocha or Uzodimma. It is about you, the voter. On January 16, will the name on your ballot paper be the same name a court recognises in March? How many candidates on the ballot are there by the grace of a pending appeal? The NDC has already alleged a plot to shut the ADC out of the elections through the courts. Whether that allegation holds water or not, the mere fact that it sounds plausible to millions of Nigerians should worry every judge, every INEC official and every politician who believes in this democracy.

Because when people begin to believe that elections are won at the Federal High Court and not at the polling unit, they stop coming out to vote. Turnout in the 2023 presidential election was about 27 per cent, the lowest since 1999. Mind you, nobody needs a court judgment to understand why many Nigerians stay at home. A voter who believes the real decision will be taken by a judge has little reason to stand in the sun for six hours.

So, what happens now? The Court of Appeal should treat the ADC appeal and the Imo West appeal as the emergencies they are and deliver judgments within days, not weeks. The Supreme Court, if it comes to that, should do the same. INEC should not take any step on the candidates’ list until the appellate courts speak, and it should tell Nigerians clearly, in plain language, who is on the ballot and why. The National Judicial Council must also look at why courts of the same jurisdiction keep handing down conflicting judgments on the same party. When the next amendment of the Electoral Act comes, the National Assembly must set one hard date after which no court can remove a candidate from a ballot, full stop, with any later grievance going to an election tribunal.

As for the political parties, they should keep proper membership registers, follow their own constitutions and conduct primaries that will stand up in court. That is not too much to ask from people who want to govern 200 million Nigerians.

An election is supposed to be a contest between candidates, with the voters as the referees. In Nigeria, we have turned it into a contest between lawyers, with the voters as the crowd outside the courtroom waiting for the verdict. That is not how it should be.