10/12/2025
When a Court Rescues the Constitution from Its Own Error — The Ibadan Episode Revisited
By Abraham Amah
The latest development in the PDP convention litigation deepens—not dilutes—the philosophical and constitutional indictment of the Ibadan convention. It must now be stated clearly, sequentially, and without euphemism.
Before the controversial Ibadan gathering, two Federal High Courts sitting in Abuja—courts of unquestionable constitutional competence—expressly barred the conduct, recognition, or continuation of the proposed PDP national convention. These orders were not casual injunctions; they were grounded on weighty issues of internal party compliance, subsisting litigations, violations of party constitution, and the Electoral Act. In law, these orders stood in rem, binding on the parties and all institutions, including INEC.
Faced with these federal restraints, the Damagun-led group, acting more like political desperados than custodians of party order, embarked on what can only be described as jurisdictional forum-shopping. In a haste bordering on panic, they procured an ex parte order from an Oyo State High Court, a court of coordinate but constitutionally inferior jurisdiction on matters involving federal agencies and national electoral processes.
That ex parte order purported to override subsisting Federal High Court orders from Abuja. It commandered a national convention to proceed notwithstanding clear federal restraints. It further compelled INEC, an agency of the Federal Government, to participate, monitor, and legitimise an exercise it had already been barred from recognising. This was not judicial activism; it was judicial adventurism.
History has now caught up with that error.
The same Oyo State High Court has since delisted INEC from the suit, explicitly acknowledging—by action if not by confession—that it lacked the jurisdiction to have dragged INEC into the matter in the first place. In doing so, the court effectively rescued INEC from its own earlier ex parte order, while simultaneously rendering that order fatally defective.
Intellectual honesty demands one conclusion. A court cannot both compel participation and later concede lack of jurisdiction over the same party without invalidating its earlier command. Jurisdiction is not elastic; it is foundational. Once absent, everything built upon it collapses.
Under Section 251 of the 1999 Constitution as amended, matters involving the Federal Government or its agencies, INEC inclusive, fall squarely within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Federal High Court. No amount of political urgency, procedural cleverness, or courtroom theatrics can relocate that authority to a state high court.
Equally instructive is the Electoral Act 2022. It does not merely empower INEC; it shields it from being conscripted into unlawful or irregular processes. INEC is not a political accessory to be summoned by desperation. It is a constitutional umpire whose participation derives only from lawful, regular, and properly convened party activities.
This judicial reversal is therefore more than a technical correction. It is a symbolic vote of no confidence in the Ibadan convention itself. If INEC was wrongly compelled, then its presence was tainted. If its presence was tainted, the legitimacy of the convention collapses. And if legitimacy collapses, whatever leadership emerged from that exercise, including the much-touted Turaki SAN chairmanship, stands on legal quicksand. No political structure erected on defective orders can survive constitutional scrutiny.
In contrast, the position maintained by the camp of His Excellency Nyesom Wike and Senator Samuel Anyanwu has been consistent, jurisprudential, and constitutionally disciplined. Their challenge was anchored before the Federal High Court, the proper forum. They insisted that subsisting court orders must be obeyed rather than evaded. They affirmed that party supremacy must operate within constitutional limits, not above them. This posture is not factionalism; it is legal sanity.
In every constitutional democracy, there is an immutable hierarchy: law above politics, the constitution above convention, jurisdiction above convenience. On that hierarchy, the Wike–Anyanwu tendency stands on the right side of the law, while the Ibadan enterprise increasingly appears as an elaborate attempt to substitute speed for legality and spectacle for substance.
The most ironic lesson in this saga is that the Oyo High Court, by its own hand, dismantled the ladder it once provided for the Ibadan convention to climb. Courts, like institutions, can err, but greatness lies in correction. Political actors, however, who build their ambitions on judicial missteps must contend with a timeless truth: what is born in disobedience to law will mature into illegitimacy and die in litigation.
The Ibadan episode is no longer merely controversial. It is juridically wounded, constitutionally compromised, and politically unsustainable. History—stern and patient—has begun to record that fact.
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