Following a court ruling halting the planned national convention of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), exposing once again the party’s deep-seated internal dysfunction, PHILIP IBITOYE examines the party’s challenges and what they hold for its future.
The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is again walking a familiar tightrope. What was supposed to be a routine national convention to elect new national officers later this month — an opportunity for renewal — has turned into a test of survival. On Friday, October 31, 2025, the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja halted the PDP convention in a suit brought by three party members — Austin Nwachukwu (Imo PDP chairman), Amah Nnanna (Abia PDP chairman), and Turnah George (South-South PDP secretary) — seeking to stop the convention. They hinged their suit on the ground of breach of the party’s constitution.
The ruling came only days after the chairman of the PDP National Convention Organising Committee (NCOC) and governor of Adamawa State, Umaru Fintiri, announced that the main opposition party had postponed the screening of aspirants for its 2025 national convention due to “unforeseen circumstances” that were not explained to the public. “The National Convention Organising Committee (NCOC) of our great party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has put on hold the screening of aspirants for the 2025 Elective National Convention, earlier scheduled for Tuesday, October 28, 2025, due to unforeseen circumstances,” Fintiri said in a statement last Monday, October 27, 2025.
The implication was that the party had yet to get its act together as it prepared for the elective convention in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital. This dilemma betrays previous projections by party leaders that they were full steam ahead with the convention plans and that nothing would stop the event from holding on Saturday, November 15, and Sunday, November 16, 2025.
Earlier in October, Fintiri led the convention committee to visit Ibadan to assess its preparedness to host PDP members across the country in November. During that visit, the Adamawa governor boasted that the party was united, focused, and determined to lead Nigeria toward a stronger, more prosperous future. He also stressed that the party was continuing to demonstrate internal cohesion and capacity to provide purposeful governance for Nigerians.
Mountain of troubles for PDP
However, recent happenings within the party have contradicted the optimism of Fintiri and other PDP leaders, who are now facing a fresh crisis over their party leadership as they continue to reel from the loss of four governors and dozens of lawmakers to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in recent months. Despite some PDP leaders often projecting a sense of unity publicly as they look to revive the fortunes of the party and mount a credible and viable challenge to the APC in 2027, it appears another group is bent on pulling the party in the opposite direction, complicating its path to success.
Trouble over the botched convention started to creep in less than two weeks ago, on Tuesday, October 21, 2025, when the Federal High Court in Abuja heard the final arguments from parties in the suit brought to stop the convention from holding and fixed Friday, October 31, to deliver a ruling. During the hearing, Chris Uche, counsel to the PDP, argued that the suit concerned the party’s internal affairs and fell outside the court’s jurisdiction. He also argued that the plaintiffs – Nwachukwu, Nnanna, and George – and the PDP National Legal Adviser, Kamaldeen Ajibade, were allegedly working against the party’s interest. However, the court disagreed with Uche’s jurisdiction argument, clarifying that the case was not about the internal affairs of the PDP but about compliance with electoral laws and laid-down guidelines.
Delivering his judgment, Justice James Omotosho ruled that the conditions for a valid national convention had not been met by the PDP leadership. He consequently declared that the party could not proceed with the convention until it had provided a proper framework for electing delegates. The judge found that congresses to elect delegates were not held in several states, further noting that where they were held, the notices were signed only by the national chairman of the party, excluding the national secretary. This, he said, was a clear breach of INEC regulations and provisions of the Electoral Act. Justice Omotosho, therefore, directed the PDP to issue fresh notices for state congresses, jointly signed by both the national chairman and national secretary, as required by law. The party must now return to the drawing board, comply with electoral guidelines, and conduct valid congresses before it can reconvene its highest decision-making gathering.
But even before this crippling judgment on Friday, the party convention was on shaky ground due to a raging dispute over the chairmanship position. Recall that during the PDP’s 102nd National Executive Committee meeting held on August 25 in Abuja, the party resolved to zone its 2027 presidential ticket to the South and the position of national chairman to the North. In response, Northern PDP leaders further micro-zoned the chairmanship slot to the North-West. Consequently, on Wednesday, October 23, 2025, it was announced on behalf of the governors and Northern leaders that a former Minister of Special Duties, Tanimu Turaki, had been adopted as the consensus candidate for the party’s national chairman during a stakeholders’ engagement. Besides Fintiri, those in attendance at the meeting included the Chairman of the PDP Governors’ Forum and Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed; Plateau State Governor, Caleb Mutfwang; Zamfara State Governor, Dauda Lawal; the party’s Acting National Chairman, Umar Damagum; and former Senate President, Bukola Saraki.
When all seemed to be well in the party and every stakeholder appeared to be moving forward united, the party’s National Organising Secretary, Umar Bature, disturbed the calm by calling a press conference the next day – Thursday, October 24 – disowning Turaki’s adoption as the consensus chairmanship candidate. According to Bature, the North-West zone did not hold any meeting to endorse Turaki. “A meeting was held yesterday [Wednesday, October 23] with other leaders of the northern zones, and the name of an individual was reportedly adopted. The North-West has not met to agree on that position,” Bature said, blowing up any sense of consensus or unity on the chairmanship position. But he was not alone in denouncing the consensus; the PDP chapters in Kebbi (where Turaki hails from) and Katsina states also disowned the arrangement, claiming that they were not consulted before the announcement. These public disagreements significantly weakened the unity front put up by Fintiri, Lawal, and other leaders who came to the consensus.
If the PDP leadership thought that was the height of their headaches, Monday, October 27, brought them another unpleasant surprise as a former governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, rejected the consensus and declared his intention to join the race for the national chairmanship. “By the grace of God, I shall today, Monday, 27th October 2025, by 11 a.m., be at Wadata Plaza, the National Headquarters of our very party, PEOPLES DEMOCRATIC PARTY, to purchase the nomination form to run for the office of the National Chairman of the Party,” he wrote in a social media post.
However, when Lamido got to the party’s national office, he could not obtain a nomination form, contrary to Fintiri’s statement that Turaki’s endorsement did not preclude other aspirants from contesting the seat. The National Secretary of the party, Samuel Anyanwu, claimed that only one copy of the national chairman form was printed, suggesting that some party leaders intended to impose Turaki on the party regardless of the ambitions of other members. Predictably, this decision did not go down well with Lamido.
Just as everyone has come to expect of PDP members dissatisfied with their party’s conduct in recent years, the former Jigawa governor did not take the slight in stride and chose to take his grievance not to an internal reconciliation committee but to the Federal High Court in Abuja. In a suit marked FHC/ABJ/CS/2299/2025, he told the court that he was “unlawfully and illegally denied” access to the nomination form required to contest for the position of PDP national chairman. But instead of asking the court to compel the PDP to grant him a form, he sought only two interim orders: one restraining the PDP from conducting its national convention and another restraining INEC from monitoring, supervising, and recognising the national convention.
Although the court rejected Lamido’s prayers earlier on Friday and did not stop the convention on his behalf, analysts viewed the interim orders he sought as an act of sabotage against the party. They noted that it was a conduct that had become customary with PDP members in recent years, as instead of finding common ground or compromise, they often prefer to blow things up.
Consequently, the PDP’S National Working Committee (NWC) has moved to punish members it accused of undermining the party through alleged anti-party activities. In a statement on Saturday, the party’s spokesperson, Debo Ologunagba, announced the suspension of Ajibade, Bature, National Secretary, Samuel Anyanwu; and Deputy Legal Adviser, Okechukwu Osuoha, in an escalation of its leadership tussle. The suspension came after Bature kicked against the consensus choice of Turaki for the national chairmanship and Ajibade clashed with the party’s acting National Chairman, Umar Damagum, in court over who would defend the party against the suit seeking to halt its convention.
The disciplinary action also came less than 24 hours after a source within the PDP NWC told Sunday Tribune that the committee members were aware of those among them who were undermining the party’s effort to move forward and hinted that disciplinary actions were on the way. “There are 14 of us on one side; there are only four of them on the other side. We are clearly the majority and we won’t allow them to destroy the party,” the source said.
A party yet to learn its lessons?
According to observers, the various tussles within the PDP project a picture of a party that has failed to learn from its past mistakes. Since the party lost power to the APC in 2015, it has been bedevilled by constant internal fighting and sabotage, limiting its ability to mount a credible challenge to the ruling party, which has poached dozens of people elected on the platform of the PDP this year alone.
Analysts note that the PDP’s persistent crises reveal an entrenched culture of impunity and self-interest that continues to undermine internal democracy within its ranks. From the Makarfi-Sheriff leadership feud of 2017 to the Atiku-Wike rift that fractured its 2023 presidential campaign, the party has shown little capacity for collective discipline or ideological clarity. Each round of conflict is triggered not by policy differences or reform ideas but by contests over access, control, and personal ambition. The result is a vicious cycle of defections, court orders, and public embarrassments that has steadily eroded public confidence in the PDP’s readiness to govern again.
Beyond the immediate legal setbacks, the current crisis highlights the PDP’s structural failure to institutionalise internal mechanisms for conflict resolution. Rather than empowering organs like the NWC and the Board of Trustees (BoT) to mediate disputes early, the party’s dominant figures often personalise power, treating reconciliation as an afterthought. Until the PDP reforms its internal governance — enforcing its constitution, promoting fairness in candidate selection, and curbing the overreach of powerful blocs — political analyst Olawale Afolabi said it risks being trapped in a perpetual loop of self-inflicted instability. He added that the PDP continues to fail to learn from its past failures. For a party that once prided itself on being Africa’s largest democracy, its inability to manage even routine processes like a national convention may well define its decline heading into 2027.
In the meantime, the PDP NWC source stated that the committee would likely begin the process of appealing the judgment halting its planned national convention on Monday. “The court is not the NWC. It is the NWC’s decision to determine who approves state congresses,” the source said, alluding to one of the reasons the court cited for stopping the convention from moving forward. In a statement on Friday, the party’s spokesperson also disclosed the PDP’s intention to appeal the judgement. Ologunagba slammed the judgement as “an assault on Nigeria’s democratic process.” He added that the Supreme Court already affirmed the supremacy of a political party in the management of its internal affairs.