By Emameh Gabriel
You can feel the tension in Ibadan. It is there, humming just beneath the surface of the political carnival. Delegates are dressed in their sharpest agbadas and suits, music is blaring, and the air is enveloped with contradictions. If you stop and listen, past the noise, you will hear the whispers. The same question is on everyone’s lips, a quiet worry cutting through the celebration: “Is this even legal?”
Today, Nigeria’s main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), is rolling the dice in a high stakes game that could define its future. They are holding their national convention to elect new leaders, but they are doing it with a major cloud hanging over them. A court in Abuja has explicitly ordered them to stop. Yet, here in Ibadan, another court has given them the green light. So the party finds itself in an impossible situation, forced to choose which judge to listen to.
When a party finds itself with two conflicting court orders and deliberately chooses the one that serves its immediate purpose, it is not being clever. It is being dangerous. The Federal High Court in Abuja said “stop.” The Oyo State High Court in Ibudan said “go.” The PDP’s choice to listen to the latter- it is about political convenience. And in a country struggling to build strong institutions, this “pick-and-choose” approach to court orders sets a terrible precedent.
At the centre of this storm is a former Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido. He is one of the PDP’s founding fathers, a man who was there when the party was built. But on Friday, he was on television explaining why he would be watching from the sidelines. His reason was simple, yet profound. “I am now a creation of the court order,” he said, his voice calm but firm. “I can’t go to the convention undermining and renouncing something I gained from the court. If I go, it means whatever I got from the court has been washed away.”
What he “got” from the court was a ruling that the party had unfairly blocked him from running for the position of National Chairman. The judge in Abuja, Justice Peter Lifu, agreed with him and told the PDP to put everything on hold. For Lamido, this is not just about a form or a position; it is about principle. It is about whether the rules matter.
But his absence speaks to a much bigger fight, one that has been brewing for years. Lamido points a direct finger at the party’s state governors. “The problem came from the governors,” he lamented, “because they are eroded with their own notion that they are now in charge.” He remembered a different PDP, one that produced presidents and was built on a broader structure. “The governors of today,” he concluded with a hint of sadness, “are emperors.”
And those “emperors” in the words of Lamido, are in Ibadan, holding their court. The governors of Bauchi, Zamfara, Adamawa, and of course, the host, Oyo State, are on the ground, projecting an image of unity and control. They have chosen to listen to the court in Ibadan that said the show could go on. The party’s South-West chairman, Kamorudeen Ajisafe, brushed off the Abuja ruling with a wave of the hand. “We are not aware of any fresh court ruling,” he said on Friday evening, a statement that many found hard to believe. “The convention will hold. Nothing will stop it.”
This “pick-and-choose” approach to court orders is what has many observers worried. This is a constitutional crisis in the making. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the body supposed to oversee the convention to ensure it’s free and fair, now finds itself in a bind. Do they go to Ibadan and risk ignoring an Abuja court? Or do they stay away and effectively declare the convention illegitimate? I understand from sources inside the commission that they have chosen the latter. They are staying away, siding with the Abuja court. This means that whatever happens in Ibadan today will be questioned, its legitimacy forever tainted.
The party’s own internal attempts to fix this mess have fallen apart. The Board of Trustees (BoT), which is supposed to be the party’s conscience, set up a committee to reconcile the warring factions. That committee looked at the chaos and said, essentially, “Pump the brakes. Postpone this convention before it tears us apart.” But in a move that shocked many, the BoT itself turned around and disowned its own committee’s report, throwing its full support behind the convention. It is like a family elder ignoring the advice of the mediator they themselves hired. It shows that the desire to push ahead, no matter the cost, has won out over the harder work of finding a compromise.
You could see the raw division play out on live television last night. On one side was Chief Bode George, another PDP founding father. He was almost sputtering with disbelief that Lamido would sue the party. “I am hell shocked,” he said, arguing that Lamido had missed the deadline for forms. On the other side was the powerful Minister of the FCT, Nyesom Wike, a key PDP figure, who coolly defended Lamido. He accused Chief George of not knowing the difference between a serious court judgment and a temporary order. It was a brutal, public clash of generations and ideologies, and it laid bare the fact that this is about more than just a deadline for a form. It’s about who gets to call the shots.
And that, ultimately, is what this is all about: 2027. The next presidential election. Everyone in that convention ground knows that whoever controls the party machinery today will have a massive advantage in determining who becomes the presidential candidate next time. The governors want a chairman they ca control. Other powerful figures, like Wike, want to prevent that from happening. Lamido’s principled stand, whether intentional or not, is a key part of that larger battle. This convention is not just about a chairman; it’s the first major battle for the soul of the opposition ahead of the next general election.
However today ends, the PDP has already lost something. It has shown that for all its talk of democracy, when the rules become inconvenient, it is willing to simply look the other way. And in a country that desperately needs a strong and principled opposition, that is a tragedy not just for the party, but for everyone.
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