Amupitan and the Stratagem of the Law, by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

In Nigeria every act of political filth sooner or later ends up in the courts. The kinds of things that come out of the courts in these disputes defy understanding. Colonial rule in Nigeria established an enduring method of cleaning up dirty politics. He always found a judge or judicial order to give him the cover of the law.

Since the start of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration in May 2023, the playbook has become a familiar one, turning Nigerian judges into what have been described as “perpetrators of confusion”. It usually begins with an orchestrated internal dispute over the leadership of an opposition political party. Then “one faction goes to court, the court issues a vague interim order dressed in Latin, total confusion breaks out, INEC is paralyzed and the opposition party is paralyzed.” It is the trick of the law.

As the country presumably hurtles towards the 2027 national elections, judges have become very busy indeed. The latest object of their attention is the African Democratic Congress (ADC).

It all began with what seemed like an ordinary manual of diabolical political witchcraft. By mid-2025, the former ruling party and then main opposition platform, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had been all but emptied. The cause or the actors responsible for it will be treated separately. Leading party members decided it was no longer a viable vehicle for their ambitions. In a country where independent candidacy is barred, control of a party is the lifeblood of political ambition.

Those who wished to leave the PDP had two options. One was to register a new party. For this they needed the approval of the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI), but they knew that a CENI under the control of the ruling party would not register a new party capable of making the 2027 elections interesting. So, they opted for the second option: entry into an existing party. For this project, apparently, they entered into an agreement with the then existing leadership of the ADC.

On July 2, 2025, Ralph Nwosu, founder and president of the ADC, announced the resignation of the national executive of the party he led and offered his support to a new interim national leadership under former Senate President, David Mark and former Interior Minister, Rauf Aregbesola.

Four weeks later, Nafiu Bala Gombe, who ran for governor of Gombe State in 2023 on the party platform, proclaimed himself as the new interim president of the ADC. Nafiu Bala said he took this step as National Vice President under Ralph Nwosu. In a statement dated August 1, 2025, he dismissed as “wholly false, misleading, harmful and untrue” a letter dated July 18, 2025, in which he was said to have resigned as the party’s national vice-president.

A month later, on 2 September 2025, Nafiu Bala initiated legal action in the Federal High Court, Abuja seeking to stop INEC from recognizing the new leadership of David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola. The case was assigned to Emeka Nwite, a judge. Bala Nafiu continued his case by asking the judge to issue an order granting him the requested orders without hearing the other parties sued. Those were Rauf Aregbesola, the INEC, the ADC and Ralph Nwosu.

Very importantly, David Mark was not a party to that court case and no one asked to join him. When the request for a hearing was made around September 4, the judge refused Bala Nafiu’s insistence and, instead, asked him to put all the defendants on notice to allow the court to make an informed decision on the matter after granting a hearing to all those involved.

After that, the facts seemed to fall apart.

On or around 9 September 2025, INEC formally recognized David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola as the new leaders of the party. This is important because it gave them access to the CENI portal for the purpose of certifying candidates on the party platform in the elections.

Subsequently, David Mark, who was not a party to the High Court case, appealed to the Court of Appeal in which he questioned the power of the court to make the order calling on the parties to respond to Bala Nafiu’s case. My friends who think they know Nigerian law say – and I truly believe them – that this has them scratching their heads.

Now, as he was not a party to the original case in the High Court, David Mark could not appeal against the decision except with the leave of the court. He neither sought nor received it. Having failed to do so, the conditions for a competent appeal did not exist and the Court of Appeal had no jurisdiction to hear the appeal.

The only thing more inexplicable than the appeal itself is that it took the Court of Appeal more than five months and nearly 60 pages to reach a decision on this case.

Three judges of the Court of Appeal heard the case. On March 12, they issued their decision. In a 40-page ruling, Uchechukwu Onyemenam, the senior appellate judge, “dismissed” the appeal with costs estimated at two million Naira.

Subsequently, the judge took the initiative to “protect the integrity of the proceedings” before Emeka Nwite at the Federal High Court and ordered the parties to “maintain the ante-bellum status quo” and “refrain from any step or act capable of imposing a fait accompli on the court or otherwise rendering the proceedings before the court of first instance futile”.

In his opinion, Okon Abang, the commission’s young appellate judge whose text took up 15 pages, initially said he agreed. In fact, he didn’t. It ruled that having failed to obtain the necessary permission to appeal, David Mark’s appeal was incompetent. Indeed, Okon Abang described the case as “a nullity”. This means that there was actually no appeal. It is therefore difficult to understand how he was able to “reject” an appeal that by right did not exist.

The other appellate judge of the panel was Mohammed Mustapha. He had the privilege of deciding the playoff. But whether he has issued a sentence is yet to be discovered.

Among those ordered by the Court of Appeal to respect the ante-bellum status quo was INEC. The Commission has a rich supply of senior lawyers on its payroll, both as staff and as external lawyers. In fact, its president, Joash Amupitan, is both a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and a professor of law.

The Commission took three weeks to analyze this ruling and, upon completion, sent a journalist, Mohammed Haruna, to announce that, in compliance with the Court of Appeal order, it had decided to withdraw the recognition of David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola as president and secretary of the ADC.

INEC and its leadership have missed the irony of choosing to issue this position on All Fools Day. The party primaries begin in three weeks. Parties must submit their membership register to INEC 21 days before the primaries. A party mired in prefabricated legal disputes cannot do a single thing. This would disqualify it as a platform for the 2027 elections.

President Amupitan knows what he is doing.

To drive home this point, he chose to shred the robes of a neutral arbiter or the pretense of complying with a Court of Appeal order that existed entirely in his imagination, threatening political Armageddon on the ADC if he proceeded with a party conference. As if to confirm who the whisperer is, the presidential spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, advised the ADC to “please listen to the INEC chairman. He is a law professor.” Behind the cunning of the law, a malevolent plan hides in plain sight. Politics

■ You can contact a lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu [email protected]

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