By Lemmy Ughegbe, Ph.D
Nigeria’s democracy has many enemies. Some carry guns. Some carry briefcases. Some wear robes. The Federal High Court sitting in Lokoja delivered a ruling on June 26, 2026 that should trouble every Nigerian who still believes the courts are the last constitutional line of defence. Justice Isah Dashen set aside his own court’s December 2025 judgment directing the Independent National Electoral Commission to register the Nigeria Democratic Congress as a political party.
The application that triggered this reversal was filed by an association called the Peace Movement Party, which is not a registered political party, was not among the 171 associations that applied to INEC for registration, and has no known standing in the current political process.
The legal problem here is not subtle. It is foundational. A court that has delivered final judgment on a matter is, in law, functus officio. The Latin phrase means precisely what it says: having performed the office. The court’s authority on that matter is exhausted. It cannot be recalled by a motion.
Nigerian courts have affirmed this principle repeatedly. In Chukwuka v. Ezulike (1986) and in a long line of decisions up to EGWU v. Mainstreet Bank (2017), the Court of Appeal restated that once a court delivers judgment, it cannot revisit, review or set aside that decision.
The Supreme Court in the Adesanya v. President of Nigeria line of authorities has further established that to invoke the jurisdiction of a court, a claimant must demonstrate that civil rights and obligations personal to them are directly at issue.
As Senior Advocate Monday Ubani recently observed in a related context, “mere civic concern, institutional interest, political dissatisfaction, or a desire to ensure constitutional compliance does not, without more, automatically translate into standing under the traditional doctrine of locus standi.”
The Peace Movement Party, which is not a registered entity and appears to have no current participation in the electoral process, cannot satisfy that threshold. The question of locus standi, which Nigerian jurisprudence describes as a “place of standing,” requires a claimant to show sufficient interest or an injury peculiar to itself. An unregistered association claiming a logo dispute from 2015 as its grievance, in a motion rather than a substantive suit, should have been dismissed before the court proceeded one step further. Instead, the court obliged it.
The maxim res judicata pro veritate accipitur holds that a matter once decided by a competent court is accepted as truth. Its companion principle, nemo debet bis vexari pro una et eadem causa, provides that no person should be vexed twice for the same cause. These are not technical rules designed to frustrate justice. They are the architecture of judicial finality. They exist so that a party that has won in court does not spend the rest of its life defending a judgment that should be settled. When a court sets aside its own final judgment on a motion by a stranger to the original proceedings, it does not merely bend these principles. It breaks them.
This is a strong thing to say. It is also a necessary thing to say.
That said, let no one mistake this column for a defence of the Nigeria Democratic Congress. The NDC has questions to answer that have nothing to do with Justice Dashen. A political party that cannot resolve basic matters of registration procedure and internal leadership before presenting itself to Nigerians as an alternative government has not taken its own ambitions seriously.
The logo dispute at the centre of the Lokoja proceedings did not appear from nowhere. The NDC walked into that vulnerability. Its inability to close those gaps is a failure of political management that its leadership must own without evasion.
QBut the NDC’s disorder does not cure the court’s disorder. The two failures are separate, and collapsing them into one narrative is exactly the confusion that benefits those who would rather Nigerians not notice what has been happening in the judiciary in political cases.
The pattern is not new. Since the 2023 general elections, Nigerian courts have come under sustained and justified scrutiny for rulings that strained credulity and conveniently favoured entrenched power. Professor Farooq Kperogi described the Supreme Court after the 2023 presidential election as “the most hopeless Supreme Court in the history of the world’s supreme courts.”
That was an intemperate judgment, but it captured a real and widespread loss of confidence. Femi Falana, SAN, has argued that the judiciary can be criticised without being scandalised. He is right. Criticism is not contempt. Silence in the face of judicial misconduct is complicity.
Nigeria is barely seven months away from a general election that will define the direction of this republic for years. The 90-day statutory window within which the NDC’s registration could have been legitimately challenged had long elapsed before the Lokoja application was filed. INEC itself, the only constitutionally empowered body in this area, was not the appellant in these proceedings. An unregistered association was. And a court that should have dismissed that application on first principles instead opened the matter afresh.
These are not the hallmarks of an independent judiciary defending constitutional order. They are the hallmarks of a judiciary that has made itself available for political assignments. As Ubani SAN has warned, “the political space is becoming increasingly restrictive through judicial interventions of this nature.”
The danger extends well beyond the NDC. It goes to the question of what kind of republic Nigeria intends to be. A democracy in which courts can be used to thin the field of opposition before a single vote is cast is not a democracy in any meaningful sense. It is managed succession dressed in legal costume.
Nigerians approaching 2027 deserve a judiciary that enforces its own judgments with consistency, respects the principles of finality on which the entire legal order rests, and treats the electoral process as a matter of public trust rather than private arrangement.
What they appear to have instead is a bench with undertakers among its number, quietly measuring the democratic space for burial.
That should alarm everyone. Not only those who support the NDC.
Dr Lemmy Ughegbe, FIMC, CMC
Email: lemmyughegbeofficial@gmail.com
WhatsApp ONLY: +2348069716645
