The Court of Appeal in Abuja has set aside key aspects of a Federal High Court judgment that recognised a factional caretaker committee in the Peoples Democratic Party holding that the trial court granted reliefs that were never sought by any of the parties to the suit.

In a judgment delivered by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam, on Wednesday, a certified true copy of which was obtained on Friday, the appellate court faulted Justice Uche Agomoh of the Federal High Court, Ibadan, for going beyond the issues placed before the court in a dispute arising from the PDP leadership crisis.

Justice Agomoh had, in a judgment delivered on January 30, recognised the caretaker committee led by Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu as the legitimate leadership faction of the party. However, the Court of Appeal held that none of the parties before the lower court had sought such a declaration.

“In the instant case, there is clearly a live issue where the trial court went outside the reliefs sought to recognise and uphold a factional caretaker committee,” Justice Onyemenam stated.

The appellate court further held that the legal foundation upon which the Federal High Court based its recognition of the committee had already been extinguished by a Supreme Court judgment nullifying the PDP’s Ibadan Convention held on November 15 and 16, 2025.

According to the court, any leadership structure, committee or organ purportedly created or validated by the convention could not survive the apex court’s decision.

“Once the Convention itself has been pronounced null, void and of no effect by the Supreme Court, any superstructure erected upon it is necessarily without legal foundation,” the judgment held.

The court noted that, but for the Supreme Court’s intervention on the validity of the convention, it might have considered ordering a retrial on issues relating to the leadership organs that emerged from the exercise.

It, however, ruled that such a step would serve no useful legal purpose since the substantive issues had already been conclusively determined.

Part of the judgment read, “This Court would be driven to the conclusion that the offending portions of the judgment, and indeed the judgment as a whole insofar as the excess permeates the decision, are a nullity and liable to be set aside ex debito justitiae.

“A direction to the trial court to retry an issue that has been settled at the apex level would, in effect, invite it either to repeat what has already been decided or to purport to sit in judgment over the Supreme Court, both of which the law forbids.”

The court added that there was no longer any live dispute between the parties in view of the binding decisions of both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, which had resolved the core issues underpinning the appeal.

Justice Onyemenam’s judgment was unanimously endorsed by the other members of the three-man panel of Justices Mohammed Mustapha and Okon Abang.

The decision effectively nullifies the basis upon which the Federal High Court recognised the caretaker committee associated with the Abdurahman Mohammed faction, marking another significant judicial pronouncement in the protracted PDP leadership dispute. (The PUNCH)

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