A Federal High Court in Abuja on Thursday removed Imo State Governor Hope Uzodimma as the All Progressives Congress candidate for the Imo West Senatorial District and ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission to recognise former governor Rochas Okorocha instead. Justice Obiora Egwuatu held that the evidence before the court showed Uzodimma was not the valid winner of the party’s primary held on May 18, 2026, and monitored by INEC. The judge ruled that Okorocha polled the highest number of votes and should have been nominated.
Justice Egwuatu ordered INEC to recognise Okorocha and publish his name as the authentic APC candidate for the senatorial election fixed for January 16, 2027. He also directed the party to forward Okorocha’s name to the commission. The court further barred Uzodimma from presenting himself as the party’s candidate for the poll.
The judgment brings to a head one of the sharpest disputes over primary results in the build-up to 2027. At the May 18 exercise held at the Orlu Local Government Secretariat, the chairman of the APC primary election committee, Rear Admiral Williams Kayoda, declared that Uzodimma polled 230,464 votes against Okorocha’s 1,098. On those figures, the governor won about 99.5 per cent of the votes cast.
Okorocha’s account was entirely different. In an affidavit filed in support of his suit, his son and Personal Assistant on Political Matters, Amen Rochas, said the former governor won with 150,780 votes while Uzodimma scored 102,158. That version would give Okorocha roughly 60 per cent of the vote. The two accounts also differ on turnout by more than 21,000 votes, and both exceed the 194,572 votes cast across all parties in the 2019 Imo West senatorial election.
The APC committee stood by its figures in court. Lucky Ajokperiniovo, who said he was a member of the committee that conducted the primary, stated in a counter-affidavit that votes were collated from the wards through local government centres before the final result was declared. He said the committee signed its report on May 18, that the exercise complied substantially with the party’s constitution, its guidelines and the Electoral Act, 2026, and that the party’s appeal committee received no petition against the outcome.
INEC had also defended Uzodimma’s nomination before the judgment. In letters dated October 5 and 8, the Imo Resident Electoral Commissioner, Chukwuemeka Ibeziako, asked the Department of State Services and the police to investigate a document circulating on social media that named Okorocha as winner, describing it as fictitious. The commission told the court that its own monitoring report identified the governor as the winner and that it had received no complaints from aspirants.
Okorocha filed the suit, marked FHC/ABJ/CS/1854/2026, on August 13, joining INEC, the APC and Uzodimma as defendants. He asked the court to decide whether INEC was bound by the reports of its officials who monitored the primary. Court papers also show that he raised questions about the governor’s eligibility to contest a senatorial election while still in office.
Uzodimma and the APC filed separate preliminary objections asking the court to dismiss the case. They argued that it was statute barred because it was not filed within 14 days, as required for pre-election matters under Section 285(9) of the 1999 Constitution, as amended. Details of how the court resolved that objection were not immediately available.
The contest pits a sitting governor against his predecessor for a seat both men have held. Uzodimma represented Imo West, also known as Orlu Senatorial District, from 2011 to 2019 before the Supreme Court declared him governor in January 2020. He is now in his second and final term. Okorocha governed the state from 2011 to 2019 and then represented the district in the Senate from 2019 to 2023.
The legal battle may not be over. The Constitution allows an appeal in a pre-election matter to be filed within 14 days of judgment and requires the appellate court to dispose of it within 60 days. Any appeal filed within that window would therefore be decided close to the January 16 election date. As of Thursday, it was not clear whether Uzodimma or the APC would challenge the judgment.