Court of Appeal Cancels Recognition of PDP Caretaker Committee

The Court of Appeal in Abuja has canceled important parts of a Federal High Court ruling that recognized a factional caretaker committee in the Peoples Democratic Party. The court said the trial court gave decisions that no party in the case asked for.

In a judgment delivered by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam on Wednesday, a certified true copy of which was obtained on Friday, the appellate court criticized Justice Uche Agomoh of the Federal High Court in Ibadan for going beyond the issues that were presented in the PDP leadership crisis.

Justice Agomoh, in a ruling on January 30, recognized the caretaker committee led by Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu as the legitimate faction of the party. However, the Court of Appeal stated that none of the parties involved in the lower court had asked for such a ruling.

"In this 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 said.

The appellate court also noted that the legal basis on which the Federal High Court recognized the committee had already been invalidated by a Supreme Court ruling that nullified the PDP’s Ibadan Convention held on November 15 and 16, 2025.

According to the court, any leadership structure, committee, or body created or validated by this convention could not stand after the Supreme Court's decision.

"Once the Convention itself has been declared null, void, and of no effect by the Supreme Court, any structure built on it has no legal basis," the judgment stated.

The court mentioned that, without the Supreme Court’s ruling on the convention's validity, it might have considered ordering a retrial on issues related to the leadership bodies that came from the convention.

However, it ruled that such a move would not serve any legal purpose since the main issues had already been conclusively decided.

Part of the judgment read, "This Court would conclude that the problematic parts of the judgment, and indeed the judgment itself, are null and should be set aside.

"A direction to the trial court to retry an issue that has already been settled at the highest level would, in effect, invite it to repeat what has already been decided or to act as if it could judge the Supreme Court, which the law does not allow."

The court added that there was no longer any live dispute between the parties, given the binding decisions from both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, which resolved the critical issues in the appeal.

Justice Onyemenam’s judgment was fully supported by the other members of the three-man panel, Justices Mohammed Mustapha and Okon Abang.

This decision effectively cancels the reasons the Federal High Court had for recognizing the caretaker committee linked to the Abdurahman Mohammed faction. This marks another important judicial decision in the ongoing PDP leadership dispute.