The Supreme Court will on April 22, 2026 hear two appeals by the Kabiru Turaki faction of the Peoples Democratic Party seeking to revive the party convention it staged in Ibadan on 15-16 November 2025. A five-man panel led by Justice Lawal Garba on Tuesday granted the faction's plea for an expedited timetable and trimmed the usual filing periods after Chris Uche, SAN, cited the need to beat the Independent National Electoral Commission schedule for the 2027 polls and filed an affidavit of extreme urgency.
In the first suit the Turaki group is up against the PDP bloc loyal to Federal Capital Territory Minister Nyesom Wike; the court ordered that hearing notice be served on the seventh respondent, Mohammed Abdulrahman, who was absent. Emmanuel Ukala, SAN, counsel for respondents Austin Nwachukwu and two others, had asked for 15 days to obtain the records of the Court of Appeal judgment that voided the Ibadan convention, but the panel gave all nine respondents only five days each to file replies.
The second appeal pits Turaki's camp against former Jigawa governor Sule Lamido, who had secured a Federal High Court order stopping the convention on the ground that he was barred from contesting the national chairmanship. Lower courts have consistently ruled against the Turaki faction, nullifying the convention, restraining INEC from recognising its outcome and, in some instances, sealing the party secretariat. The appellants contend that intra-party disputes are not justiciable and that every due process was observed.
By rushing the PDP leadership dispute onto its docket for April 22, the Supreme Court is being dragooned into a calendar dictated not by jurisprudence but by INEC's 2027 electoral timetable—an uncomfortable signal that election logistics now set the pace for constitutional interpretation.
Lower-court judgments have already stripped the Turaki group of convention legitimacy, blocked its access to the Wadata secretariat and signalled to INEC that any list emerging from Ibadan is toxic. Yet the appellants' core argument—that party constitutions are a private matter courts should not touch—strikes at the heart of Nigeria's legal doctrine on internal democracy. If the justices agree, every aggrieved aspirant from councillor to president will lose a critical courtroom route for challenging impunity in primaries.
For the ordinary card-carrying PDP member, the stakes are brutally simple: whoever wins this appeal controls delegate lists, nomination forms and billions in campaign funds. A ruling upholding the Court of Appeal would entrench Wike's nationwide structure; a reversal would resurrect Turaki's caretaker crew and reopen the presidential nomination field. Either way, grassroots members risk being railroaded by a faction they never voted for.
More broadly, the judiciary is again being asked to referee a partisan civil war instead of protecting the integrity of internal ballots. Until parties accept that transparent congresses are cheaper than Supreme Court briefs, Nigerian politics will remain a relay of courtrooms rather than polling units.
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