The Court of Appeal in Abuja has faulted a judgment of the Federal High Court in Ibadan which recognised a factional caretaker committee in the leadership crisis rocking the opposition Peoples Democratic Party.
In a judgment delivered by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam, the appellate court held that Justice Uche Agomoh of the Federal High Court went beyond the reliefs sought by the parties when she recognised a caretaker committee led by Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu.
The dispute arose from a Jan. 30 judgment of the Federal High Court in Ibadan, which held that the committee led by Mohammed and Anyanwu was the legitimate faction of the PDP.
However, the Court of Appeal held that none of the parties before the lower court had sought such a declaration.
“In the instant case, there is clearly a live issue where the trial court went outside the reliefs sought to recognise and uphold a factional caretaker committee,” Onyemenam stated in the judgment.
The appellate court further observed that the declaratory and injunctive reliefs sought on appeal were tied to the legitimacy of the PDP convention held in Ibadan in November 2025, which had already been nullified by the Supreme Court.
According to the court, if the issues before it had not been linked to the convention, it would have ordered a retrial on the leadership organs purportedly created or validated by the gathering.
“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 court held.
The appellate court said the legal basis upon which the lower court recognised the Anyanwu-led caretaker committee had been extinguished by the Supreme Court judgment and that revisiting the matter would serve no useful legal purpose.
While the Court of Appeal did not expressly describe the trial court’s action as ultra petita—a legal doctrine that applies when a court grants reliefs beyond those sought by parties—it held that the excesses in the judgment rendered it unsustainable.
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.”
The court further held that directing the lower court to retry issues already determined by the Supreme Court would amount to an invitation to either repeat settled decisions or sit in judgment over the apex court.
“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,” it stated.
On the substantive issues, the court held that decisions of both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court had already resolved the underlying controversies.
“On the merits, I hold that, by reason of the binding decisions of this Court in Appeal No. CA/ABJ/1695/2025 and of the Supreme Court in Appeal No. SC/CV/164/2026, which nullified the Ibadan Convention of 15th–16th November 2025 and settled the core issues underlying this appeal, there is no longer any live controversy between the parties,” the judgment stated.
The decision was unanimously supported by Justices Mohammed Mustapha and Okon Abang, who were members of the three-man panel.
The judgment effectively nullifies the basis upon which the Federal High Court recognised the caretaker committee associated with the Abdurahman Mohammed faction of the PDP.
