The pronouncements of the Supreme Court are meant to be final, binding, and above political manipulation. However, the rising trend of post-judgment spin, where parties declare victories irrespective of the actual content of the ruling, is gradually turning the apex court into a political football — kicked around for convenience, Olufemi Adediran of Punch Newspaper writes.
In a country where the judiciary is described as the last hope of the common man, a disturbing trend where political parties are interpreting Supreme Court judgments to suit their narratives is fast emerging. This development is casting shadows over judicial integrity, eroding democratic principles, and weakening public confidence in the rule of law.
Recent landmark judgments by the Supreme Court, notably in cases involving the Peoples Democratic Party and the Labour Party, have stirred controversies.
Sunday PUNCH notes that while the cases were not complex from the beginning, confusion began after judgments were delivered. Both parties in each case claimed victories, flooding the media and social platforms with conflicting interpretations. The result was public confusion, as the truth became blurred in a battle of narratives.
PDP’s national secretaryship judgment
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the PDP’s national secretaryship dispute was meant to bring clarity and end months of wrangling over who the real secretary was between Sunday Udeh-Okoye and Senator Samuel Anyanwu. Instead, the verdict birthed a tale of two winners.
On March 21, the apex court set aside the decision of the Court of Appeal, Enugu Division, delivered on December 20, 2024, which had affirmed Anyanwu’s removal as the National Secretary of the party. In a unanimous judgment by a five-member panel, the apex court ruled that matters concerning the leadership or membership of a political party are internal affairs and should not be subject to judicial intervention.
The judgment left the PDP leadership and members in disarray, as both parties in the suit — Anyanwu and Udeh-Okoye — claimed victory. They issued separate statements declaring victory immediately after the verdict.
The secretaryship crisis started in April 2023 when Anyanwu was elected as the PDP governorship candidate in Imo State, following which the South-East stakeholders appointed Udeh-Okoye, a former National Youth Leader, as the party’s National Secretary.
However, Anyanwu, after losing the election to Governor Hope Uzodimma, returned to assume his role as the PDP’s National Secretary. His return deepened the PDP crisis and led to a series of litigations.
In October 2023, a PDP member, Aniagwu Emmanuel, filed a suit at the High Court in Enugu State to resolve the matter. The court ruled that by holding both the National Secretary and Imo governorship candidate positions, Anyanwu had effectively made himself a judge in his own case. It noted that the PDP constitution and the party’s electoral guidelines for primary elections, issued by the National Executive Committee in March 2022, do not permit an individual to simultaneously serve as a governorship candidate and National Secretary. Consequently, the court restrained Anyanwu from parading himself as the party’s National Secretary, stating that he had relinquished the position by conduct.
Dissatisfied with the ruling, Anyanwu appealed the decision. On December 20, 2024, the Court of Appeal in Enugu upheld the High Court’s judgment, confirming Udeh-Okoye as the rightful National Secretary. This prompted Anyanwu to take the matter to the Supreme Court.
Eventually, the Supreme Court set aside the decision of the Court of Appeal, which affirmed the removal of Anyanwu by the Federal High Court, declaring that the trial court lacked jurisdiction to hear the matter instituted by Emmanuel. The apex court ruled that matters concerning the leadership or membership of a political party are internal affairs.
Following the Supreme Court’s ruling, the NWC welcomed the decision, stating that it affirmed leadership positions as internal party matters beyond judicial jurisdiction.
The National Publicity Secretary of the party, Debo Ologunagba, said the judgment reaffirmed Udeh-Okoye’s position as the substantive National Secretary, having been duly nominated and ratified by the party’s statutory organs in line with the PDP constitution.
But Anyanwu immediately visited the party’s headquarters with his supporters after the Supreme Court ruling to resume as the National Secretary of the party. “I am here to resume my duties as the National Secretary of our great party. I thank the FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, for standing by me during this challenging period,” he stated.
The Supreme Court’s ruling has the PDP at a crossroads, with the party’s leadership and members divided over the rightful occupant of the National Secretary’s office. While the NWC and key party organs have thrown their weight behind Udeh-Okoye, Anyanwu’s supporters remain defiant.
One LP, four chairmen
A similar scene played out with the Labour Party, where the Supreme Court delivered a judgment aimed at addressing the leadership tussle between two bitterly opposed camps.
Again, rather than bringing clarity, the ruling became a Rorschach test — each faction saw what it wanted to see.
The judgment, which set aside an earlier Court of Appeal verdict recognising Julius Abure as the party’s National Chairman, has generated varied interpretations, with Abure and former Minister of Finance, Senator Nenadi Usman, claiming the judgment in their favour.
In its judgment, a five-member panel of the Supreme Court held that the Court of Appeal lacked the jurisdiction to pronounce Abure as LP National Chairman, having earlier found that the substantive issue before the court was party leadership — a matter deemed an internal affair.
The lead judgment, prepared by Justice John Okoro and read by Justice Mohammed Baba Idris, noted that since the case filed at the Federal High Court centred on LP’s leadership, it was not justiciable. Consequently, the apex court set aside both the trial and appellate court decisions recognising Abure as chairman and struck out the LP’s suit for lack of jurisdiction.
“In summary, both the trial court and the lower court have no jurisdiction to have entertained the suit by the first respondent (LP). Flowing from the above, the decisions of the trial court and the court below recognising Barrister Julius Abure as the National Chairman of the first respondent are hereby set aside,” the court stated.
The judgment followed appeals against the October 8, 2024 decision of Justice Emeka Nwite of the Federal High Court, which had directed INEC to recognise Abure’s leadership. On January 17, 2025, the Court of Appeal reaffirmed Abure’s chairmanship.
In a statement shortly after the Supreme Court ruling, Usman, who chairs the LP’s caretaker committee, described the judgment as a triumph for the rule of law and democracy. “There is no victor and no vanquished. What matters most is our shared commitment to the ideals and aspirations of the Labour Party and the Nigerian people. We must now come together, united in purpose and vision, to move the party forward,” she said.
However, Abure, through a statement signed by the LP National Publicity Secretary, Obiora Ifoh, insisted that the Supreme Court judgment did not remove him from office.
He argued that the ruling merely held that the courts lacked jurisdiction to interfere in internal party matters, thus striking out both Usman’s appeal and LP’s original suit. “The Supreme Court judgment didn’t sack LP National Chairman Barrister Julius Abure; rather it rightly upheld the preceding and accumulated High Court and Appeal Court judgments upholding the immutability of the responsibility of Labour Party structures to choose its leaders,” the statement read.
The confusion has further worsened the crisis rocking the party as both Abure and the presidential candidate of the party in the 2023 election, Peter Obi, simultaneously called for separate meetings of the National Executive Committee to discuss the future of the party.
This is as one of the party leaders, Lamidi Apapa declared himself the leader of the party at a press conference on Wednesday, citing the apex court’s judgement as his reason for taking over. He said all the court’s pronouncements had nullified all actions and decisions taken by Abure since April 2023.
Lawyers, analysts speak
Legal luminaries and political analysts warned that politicians spinning judgments to serve political ends may erode public trust in the judiciary. They argued that if politicians continue to treat the judiciary as just another arena for propaganda, then no judgment will ever bring closure.
They added that Nigeria may end up as a society where the law means whatever political parties say it means.
Speaking to Sunday PUNCH, a former Chairman of the Legal Aid Council and Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Chief Bolaji Ayorinde, described the trend as very dangerous for the country’s judicial system and democracy.
According to him, the development is not only a setback for democracy and the rule of law but also a threat to the nation’s collective existence as a people. He stressed the need for the judiciary not only to deliver clear and unambiguous judgments but also to actively enforce them.
Ayorinde said, “It is an extremely dangerous trend. It is not only bad for democracy but also bad for the rule of law and even our existence as a people. Again, the court must be ready to enforce its judgments, bark and bite if necessary. So, the judiciary has to find its way to enforce court judgments. They must also make judgments clear and unambiguous and enforce their judgments; if not, this will continue and it will get worse to the extent that people will no longer fear the court. We have seen government operatives and even ordinary citizens not complying with court judgments; if this continues, our courts will be rendered as toothless bulldogs.”
Also lending his voice to the growing concern, a former National Vice President of the Nigerian Bar Association, Monday Ubani, SAN, described the trend of political parties twisting court judgments to fit their personal agendas as a dangerous and unacceptable practice that must be stopped.
He emphasised that the onus was on the courts to be as explicit as possible when delivering verdicts, so as to leave no room for misinterpretation. Ubani expressed concern that politicians had mastered the act of twisting Supreme Court judgments to serve personal interests, especially in high-stakes political matters.
Ubani said, “It is a dangerous trend for parties in a suit to, most of the time, interpret the judgments of the courts to suit their expected end—whatever they have in mind different from what the court has actually decided. We should not allow this to continue. The court should try as much as possible to be explicit in pronouncing their verdicts. Judgments must be clear, such that the party that lost will be duly told that it lost the case so that they don’t go about giving interpretations that suit their whims and caprices.
“Making judgments expressly clear to all parties in any case is the way to solving this issue because whenever things are left hanging, people come up with interpretations that suit their purposes. The judiciary must go further in making pronouncements that make it difficult for parties to give their own interpretations of judgments.
“In the Labour Party case, when you appeal a case as an appellant and it is said that your case is dismissed, it means you don’t have any standing in that case, but you find out that it is now becoming a pattern that even the person whose appeal was dismissed will be coming out rejoicing that he has won. Politicians must not carry their ways of doing things into the judiciary. And lawyers must be able to always advise their clients, when they have obtained the certified true copies of the judgments, to tell them ‘this is what the court has actually ruled on the matter’ so that this wrong interpretation will not continue.”
He emphasised that judges handling political matters must be very explicit in their pronouncements so that there won’t be any room for dubious interpretation by the politicians.
“Judgments of courts are meant to be obeyed and not to be given dubious interpretations that suit their whims and caprices,” he stated.
A political analyst and scholar from the Department of Political Science, University of Ilorin, Prof. Hassan Salisu, warned that the trend of misinterpreting court judgments by politicians posed a serious threat to Nigeria’s democratic future.
Salisu, who is the President of the Nigeria Political Science Association, described the trend as a symptom of deeper institutional weakness, noting that it reflected remnants of the military system of government.
“What distinguishes democracy from non-democratic forms of government is the adherence to the rule of law. To this extent, there is no provision for self-help that parties or politicians can choose or cherry-pick which court judgment to align with or not. If they are in doubt, they should go back to the court for correct interpretation. What is happening shows that we are not in a full democracy—we still have a military hangover. The judiciary is not there to please everybody, it is there rather to interpret the law. So, politicians should make sure that their actions and steps align with the law.
“It is not provided in the Constitution that litigants can interpret the law. If we continue this way, democracy will have a very bleak future in our country because the orderliness that is being associated with democracy will be eroded.
“As soon as people begin to lose hope in democracy due to the actions of political actors, democracy itself will be in danger. We might wake up one day and discover that there is no longer democracy. People need to know that democracy is about respecting the rights of others, about respecting the law. It has a lot of repercussions for Nigeria’s democracy—it will endanger democracy,” Salisu said.