Party Survival Now Rests With The Courts Ahead Of 2027
Barely a year before Nigerians return to the polls, the sharpest contests of the 2027 election cycle are playing out not on campaign podiums but inside courtrooms, where a widening chain of suits now hangs over the survival of some opposition platforms and the candidacies they carry.
The pattern hardened on Monday, July 13, 2026, when the Court of Appeal in Abuja, in a split two to one decision, barred the Independent National Electoral Commission from recognising state congresses organised by the caretaker leadership of the African Democratic Congress headed by former Senate President David Mark. Delivering the lead judgment in the appeal marked CA/ABJ/CV/608/2026, Justice Okon Abang, with Justice Donatus Okorowo concurring, upheld an April 29 order by Justice Joyce Abdulmalik of the Federal High Court and held that the congresses and national convention conducted by the Mark leadership were a nullity because they defied a subsisting order made on April 14. The presiding member of the panel, Justice Abba Mohammed, dissented, holding that the dispute was an internal party affair beyond the court’s jurisdiction. The court awarded costs of N10 million against the ADC, which, through its National Welfare Secretary, Nkem Ukandu, indicated it would proceed to the Supreme Court.
The ruling sits awkwardly beside INEC’s own position. The commission has said it recognises only candidates submitted by the Mark faction, citing a separate Supreme Court judgment that affirmed his leadership. INEC National Commissioner Mohammed Haruna confirmed that the faction was granted portal access and had submitted candidates for 471 positions, comprising two presidential, 109 senatorial and 360 House of Representatives slots. Responding to Monday’s appellate judgment, Haruna said the commission would withhold comment until it obtained the certified copy. The ADC has separately urged INEC to ensure the investigation and prosecution of a rival figure, Nafiu Bala, after the commission clarified that a document purporting to show he had uploaded candidates through its restricted portal was forged.
A parallel storm surrounds the Nigeria Democratic Congress, the platform on which former Labour Party candidate Peter Obi, running with former Kano governor Rabiu Kwankwaso, hopes to contest. On December 10, 2025, Justice Isah Dashen of the Federal High Court in Lokoja ordered INEC to register the party, and the commission did so on February 5, 2026. On June 26, 2026, the same judge set aside his own December judgment following a motion by the Peace Movement Party, which claimed ownership of the two finger victory symbol adopted as the NDC logo, and ordered the suit to begin afresh. The NDC has appealed and sought a stay, insisting it remains duly registered, and its leader, Seriake Dickson, confirmed that Obi’s name had already been uploaded to the INEC portal. Senior lawyers have questioned the reversal. Ifedayo Adedipe, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, said a court may reopen a concluded case only in narrow circumstances such as fraud, while another silk, Jibrin Okutepa, described the decision as legally questionable given that INEC had already obeyed the earlier order.
The deregistration threat runs wider still. In June, Justice Peter Lifu of the Federal High Court in Abuja directed INEC to delist the ADC, Accord Party, Zenith Labour Party, Action Peoples Party and Action Alliance for allegedly failing to meet the constitutional threshold for retaining registration. A three member panel of the Court of Appeal overturned that decision and faulted the judge for disregarding its May 22, 2026 order suspending proceedings. Notably, that deregistration process was set in motion not by INEC’s own audit but by a suit filed by the Incorporated Trustees of the National Forum of Former Legislators, with support from the Office of the Attorney General, a shift several practitioners have flagged as turning an administrative housekeeping tool into an instrument of litigation.
The power itself is well grounded. Section 225A of the 1999 Constitution, introduced by the 2018 Fourth Alteration, empowers INEC to deregister parties that fail to win a minimum threshold of seats or votes. Acting on it, the commission on February 6, 2020 delisted 74 parties, cutting the field from 92 to 18, and the Supreme Court upheld the power as self operating in its 2021 decision in INEC against National Unity Party. Yet the same litigation established a limit, as the Court of Appeal reinstated a number of the affected parties on the ground that deregistration must comply with the right to fair hearing.
Against that backdrop, an earlier Federal High Court ruling by Justice Musa Liman in Abuja retained Mark as ADC National Chairman, struck out a suit by House of Representatives member Leke Abejide as lacking merit, and held that the court could not interfere in a party’s internal affairs. The court awarded N2 million in costs against Abejide in favour of each defendant and a further N10 million against his counsel. The competing outcomes, several delivered by courts of equal standing, capture the central tension now facing the judiciary, namely where the settled rule that party administration is an internal matter yields to claims of constitutional breach. As Justice Abang put it in the ADC judgment, once a complaint is anchored on a constitutional infraction, the shield of internal affairs drops.
The stakes are not abstract. The Accord Party, one of those targeted for deregistration, is the platform on which Osun State Governor Ademola Adeleke, who defected from the Peoples Democratic Party in November 2025, is seeking a second term in the governorship election fixed for August 15, 2026, the last major poll before the general elections. Adeleke has publicly insisted the party will remain on the ballot.
The reliance on courts to settle political questions is long standing. Following the 1979 election, the Supreme Court was asked to interpret the disputed formula of two thirds of 19 states after Obafemi Awolowo of the Unity Party of Nigeria challenged Shehu Shagari’s victory. On the eve of the June 12, 1993 election, a ruling by Bassey Ikpeme sought to halt the vote, feeding the confusion the military later exploited to annul the poll widely believed to have been won by Moshood Abiola. In the Fourth Republic, it took nearly the whole of Chris Ngige’s tenure before the Supreme Court affirmed in 2006 that Peter Obi had won the 2003 Anambra election, a judgment that created the country’s off cycle governorship polls. The court nullified the APC’s votes in Zamfara in 2019 over invalid primaries, voided the party’s Bayelsa victory a day before inauguration over forged certificates, and later excluded it from the Rivers contest for want of validly nominated candidates. Even so, the court upheld the National Assembly elections of Godswill Akpabio and Ahmed Lawan despite questions over the Electoral Act 2022 provision on multiple primaries.
The direction of the current disputes will likely be decided at the appellate courts in the coming weeks, with INEC maintaining that it will act only on final judgments. The Punch Editorial Board has characterised the trend as a democracy increasingly run of the courts and by the courts and has called on the National Judicial Council to check conflicting rulings by courts of coordinate jurisdiction. Others argue that judicial review remains a legitimate guardrail where parties breach the constitution or their own rules. What is not in dispute is that, with the register of contestants still unsettled, several platforms head towards 2027 under a cloud that only the courts, for now, can lift.