The Federal High Court in Abuja on Thursday, November 5, nullified the leadership of the opposition African Democratic Congress and invalidated the presidential candidacy of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar for the 2027 election. The judgment is not an isolated legal occurrence. It is the product of a leadership dispute that began long before the gavel fell on November 5, and it raises constitutional questions that go well beyond the ADC or the 2027 general elections.
The dispute traces back to the aftermath of the 2023 general elections, when opposition politicians began exploring ways to unite against the ruling All Progressives Congress ahead of 2027. The coalition settled on the ADC, and on July 2, 2025, the party’s founding National Chairman, Ralph Nwosu, announced that the existing leadership would step aside. David Mark emerged as interim National Chairman, and Rauf Aregbesola became interim National Secretary.
That transition immediately generated internal rifts. Nafiu Bala Gombe, a former ADC deputy national chairman, argued that with Nwosu’s resignation, he was constitutionally entitled to assume the party’s leadership. On September 2, 2025, Gombe filed a suit at the Federal High Court in Abuja, challenging the legitimacy of the Mark-led leadership.
What followed exposed the fragility of the situation. INEC initially recognised the Mark-led leadership in September 2025. Then, in March 2026, the Court of Appeal directed parties to maintain the status quo, and INEC withdrew recognition from both factions. The Supreme Court later set aside that order and directed an expedited hearing at the Federal High Court.
On July 2, 2026, Justice Musa Liman of the same Federal High Court struck out a separate suit challenging Mark’s leadership, holding that the matter was an internal party affair over which the court lacked jurisdiction. Justice Liman directed INEC to recognise Mark and the National Working Committee. The ADC celebrated this as a vindication.
Then came November 5, 2026. Justice Peter Lifu, ruling on Gombe’s suit, declared the Mark-led caretaker committee illegal and voided all decisions taken under it, including the presidential primary that produced Atiku as the ADC’s candidate. The court held that the emergence of the Mark-led leadership violated the ADC constitution, the Electoral Act and the 1999 Constitution. The judgment came barely 24 hours after Atiku held a massive campaign rally in Sokoto State.
In response to the judgment, the ADC, in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, described the ruling as another desperate attempt to cripple the opposition and accused the APC of orchestrating a judicial assault. The party argued that the judgment was legally indefensible because it contradicted the subsisting ruling of Justice Liman of coordinate jurisdiction, and warned the APC not to “play with fires you cannot control.” The APC has denied involvement.
But the constitutional questions at stake are more significant than the partisan recriminations. The first is the problem of coordinate jurisdiction. Two judges of the same court reached opposing conclusions on the same leadership question within four months of each other. Justice Liman held that the matter was non-justiciable; Justice Lifu held that it was. When courts of equal standing disagree, the legal system offers no automatic mechanism for resolution short of appeal. In the interim, INEC is left to determine which order to obey. This is not a theoretical dilemma. It is a live threat to the integrity of the 2027 election.
Yet before the question of coordinate jurisdiction, there is a more fundamental one that has received far less attention: whether the Mark-led caretaker committee had any constitutional basis to exist in the first place. The sequence of events is instructive. The coalition needed a party. It persuaded the party’s National Chairman, Ralph Nwosu, to resign. The resigning Chairman then pronounced a caretaker committee headed by David Mark. The person who had just vacated office was the one constituting the body that would replace the party’s elected leadership. What did the ADC’s own constitution say about succession upon the resignation of a National Chairman? Did it provide for a caretaker committee, or did it require the Deputy National Chairman to take over? These are not academic questions. They go to the root of the November 5 judgment, and they were raised by Gombe, the former deputy national chairman who argued that he was constitutionally entitled to assume leadership.
The political reality is that the coalition appears to have bought a party through the back door. Rather than secure the resignation of the entire National Working Committee and constitute a caretaker committee through the proper organ, it secured only the National Chairman’s cooperation. He handed over a party structure that had no clear constitutional foundation and walked away. The warning signs were there from the beginning. The crisis was seeded at the point of takeover, not at the point of judgment. Even if the matter had been adjudicated by the most obscure customary court in the land, the outcome would likely have been the same, because the defect was structural and present from day one.
The second question concerns the justiciability of internal party affairs. Section 84(14) of the Electoral Act was designed to insulate party leadership tussles from routine judicial intervention, directing disputes to internal mechanisms. Yet in practice, internal party crises continue to migrate from ward meetings to courtrooms. The ADC case illustrates why: when a party’s own dispute-resolution mechanisms are perceived as compromised, litigation becomes the only recourse.
This breakdown was not invisible before November 5. Babachir Lawal, a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation and a founding member of the ADC, resigned from the party in May 2026—months before the court ruling—alleging that the presidential primaries were “massively rigged” in favour of Atiku and that results were “written or rewritten.” Lawal’s claims were contested, and Atiku’s team dismissed them as lacking evidence. But the fact that a respected member felt compelled to leave on those grounds is itself evidence that the party’s internal dispute-resolution mechanisms had ceased to function credibly. The court did not create the ADC’s crisis on November 5. It formalised a breakdown that had been unfolding for months.
The constitutional question, then, is not simply whether the court was right to intervene. It is whether Nigeria’s legal framework provides any effective alternative when a party’s internal mechanisms fail so completely that even its own founders walk away.
The third question concerns the remedy. The court did not merely nullify the leadership; it voided all decisions taken under it, including the nomination of every ADC candidate for every elective office in 2027. This is a sweeping remedy. It is legally coherent if the leadership itself was illegal, but it imposes severe consequences on candidates who had no role in the leadership dispute and on voters who had no say in the party’s internal management. The proportionality of such a remedy is a constitutional question in its own right. Does the law require the invalidation of every downstream decision when an upstream leadership structure is found to be defective? Or should courts fashion remedies that preserve the rights of innocent candidates while sanctioning the leadership failure? The Electoral Act does not provide a clear answer.
For party politics in Nigeria, the implications are sobering. The ADC case is not an anomaly. The PDP has been trapped in prolonged internal disputes, with conflicting court rulings and defections by governors and lawmakers citing instability. The Labour Party has seen INEC list its officials “by court order,” a stark illustration of how judicial intervention has become the primary mechanism for resolving internal party disputes. The Nigerian Bar Association has itself expressed concern over courts interfering in party internal affairs, warning that such practices could transform judicial processes into avenues for political score-settling.
The deeper problem is structural. Nigeria’s party system is already fragmented and personality-driven. If the courts become the primary arena for settling internal party disputes, the result will be weaker parties, more unpredictable elections and a political culture that rewards litigation over organisation. The ADC judgment is a test case. How the appeal is handled, and whether INEC is left guessing which order to obey, will shape how parties manage their affairs and whether Nigerians can have confidence that the 2027 election will reflect their choices. The outcome will tell us much about whether party politics can be stabilised, or whether the courtroom will remain the arena where Nigeria’s elections are truly decided.
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