The Court of Appeal in Abuja has overturned major portions of a Federal High Court ruling that recognised a factional caretaker committee within the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), declaring that the lower court exceeded its jurisdiction by granting reliefs that were not sought by any of the parties involved in the case.
In a judgment delivered on Wednesday by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam, the appellate court held that the Federal High Court in Ibadan erred in recognising the caretaker committee led by Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu as the legitimate leadership structure of the PDP.
A certified true copy of the judgment, obtained on Friday, showed that the Court of Appeal faulted Justice Uche Agomoh for venturing beyond the matters presented before the court in the lingering leadership tussle rocking the opposition party.
Justice Agomoh had, in a January 30 ruling, affirmed the Mohammed-led caretaker committee as the authentic faction of the PDP leadership. However, the appellate court ruled that none of the litigants had specifically requested such a declaration.
Justice Onyemenam stated that the trial court improperly introduced and resolved issues outside the scope of the claims before it.
“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,” the appellate judge held.
The Court of Appeal further noted that the basis upon which the Federal High Court relied to validate the committee had already been nullified by the Supreme Court’s earlier judgment voiding the PDP’s Ibadan Convention conducted on November 15 and 16, 2025.
According to the appellate court, every structure, organ, or leadership arrangement that emerged from the convention automatically lost legal standing once the apex court invalidated the exercise.
“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 stated.
The appellate court explained that although it could have considered ordering a retrial on issues surrounding the disputed leadership organs, such a move had become unnecessary because the Supreme Court had already conclusively resolved the substantive questions.
It warned that directing a lower court to revisit issues already settled by the apex court would amount to judicial overreach and conflict with established legal principles.
Part of the ruling 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 appellate court also held that there was no longer any subsisting dispute requiring adjudication since both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court had already addressed the core legal questions surrounding the controversy.
The judgment received unanimous backing from the two other members of the three-man panel, Justices Mohammed Mustapha and Okon Abang.
The latest ruling effectively dismantles the legal foundation upon which the Federal High Court recognised the Abdurahman Mohammed-led caretaker committee, representing another major judicial development in the prolonged PDP leadership crisis.
