Supreme court nullifies PDP Ibadan convention

The Supreme Court on Thursday invalidated the National Convention of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, held in Ibadan, Oyo State on November 15 and 16, 2025.

The convention produced the Tanimu Turaki, SAN-led factional national executives of the party and had been the subject of protracted legal disputes prior to the Supreme Court’s verdict.

In a split decision delivered by a five-member panel of the apex court, three justices held that the appeal filed by the Turaki-led faction lacked merit and affirmed the concurrent findings of the Federal High Court and the Court of Appeal against the conduct of the convention.

Justice Stephen Adah, who delivered the lead judgment in appeal number SC/CV/164/2026, held that the appellants violated a subsisting order of the Federal High Court restraining them from proceeding with the planned convention.

The apex court consequently dismissed both the appeal and cross-appeals and ordered parties to bear their respective costs. It held that disobedience of the court order was not disputed.

How PDP sank in the mud

The background to the crisis goes deeper than the convention itself. PDP’s internal fractures intensified after the 2023 general elections, especially over unresolved bitterness from the presidential ticket zoning dispute and the struggle for control of the party machinery. Over time, the disagreement stopped being just political and became institutional: who controls the national secretariat, who signs for the party, who INEC should recognise, and who can validly organise a convention before 2027. Analysts think that the crisis has been severe enough to deepen defections and weaken the party’s standing as the main opposition.

The first faction was the Kabiru Turaki-led group, which emerged from the Ibadan convention and insisted that the courts had no business interfering because the matter was an internal affair of the party. That camp argued that it was the valid National Working Committee because delegates had actually met and produced officers at the convention, and it kept describing itself as the authentic leadership while heading to the Supreme Court after defeats in the lower courts.

The second faction was the bloc aligned with Wike and operationally represented in court-recognised form by Abdulrahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu. Their claim was that legitimacy could only come from strict obedience to court orders, the PDP constitution, and electoral law, not from a convention conducted while injunctions were still in force. Courts repeatedly favoured this position, with reports saying that this bloc gained the advantage because judges nullified the Ibadan convention and barred INEC from recognising its outcomes.

What made the crisis particularly explosive was that both sides claimed legality from different sources. The Turaki faction relied on the fact of the convention and the officers produced there. The Wike-backed faction relied on earlier court orders and procedural compliance, arguing that no convention held in breach of those orders could create lawful leadership. That is why the struggle was not just political rivalry; it became a contest over constitutional obedience versus convention-based authority.

The legal trigger of the crisis was a series of court rulings before and after the convention. One key ruling restrained the party from proceeding until Sule Lamido was allowed to participate properly in the contest for national chairman. The courts also found that the party failed to meet required legal and procedural conditions, including valid notice issues involving INEC and defects in pre-convention congresses. Because the party still went ahead with the Ibadan gathering, the courts treated the exercise as one done in disobedience of valid court orders.

By the time the matter got to the appellate courts, the dispute had hardened into an open two-faction war.

Now, the gladiators may go back to the drawing board for political realignments.