*As PDP Judgment Triggers Calls For NJC Investigation
The Court of Appeal in Abuja has declared as a nullity the judgment of Justice Uche Nma Agomoh of the Federal High Court, Ibadan, for granting reliefs that no party before her court sought in a dispute over the leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a finding that has raised serious questions about whether the conduct of a judge with 14 years of experience on the federal bench amounts to a genuine legal error or points to something more troubling that the National Judicial Council (NJC) should investigate.
The appellate court, in a judgment delivered by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam and unanimously endorsed by Justices Mohammed Mustapha and Okon Abang, held that Justice Agomoh went beyond the issues before her when she recognised and upheld a factional caretaker committee led by Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu as the legitimate leadership of the PDP, despite no party in the proceedings having sought such a declaration.
“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,” Justice Onyemenam stated, before describing the offending portions of the judgment, “and indeed the judgment as a whole insofar as the excess permeates the decision,” as “a nullity and liable to be set aside ex debito justitiae.”
The question now being asked within legal circles is straightforward: how does a judge who was sworn in on May 28, 2012, who has presided over high-profile criminal prosecutions, cybercrimes, electoral disputes, and constitutional matters across multiple Federal High Court divisions including Port Harcourt, Ado-Ekiti, and Ibadan, grant a major political declaration that nobody asked for? Was it a momentary lapse, a misunderstanding of the scope of the reliefs before her, or was the judgment influenced by considerations that do not appear on the record?
Justice Uche Nma Agomoh (sometimes referred to as Uche Ogomoh or Uche Gomoh in various reports) was born on February 16, 1962, in Enugu State. She is an indigene of Abia State and was officially sworn in as a judge of the Federal High Court on May 28, 2012, as part of a cohort of 12 newly appointed judges inducted by the then Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Dahiru Musdapher, at the Supreme Court complex in Abuja.
With approximately 14 years on the federal bench, Justice Agomoh is not a newly appointed judge learning the ropes. She has handled complex litigation across multiple subject areas and multiple court divisions. A judge of her tenure and experience is expected to know, without any ambiguity, that a court is bound by the reliefs sought by the parties before it and cannot grant declarations or orders that no party has requested.
The rule against granting unsought reliefs is not an obscure legal technicality or a point on which reasonable jurists might disagree. It is one of the most elementary principles of adjudication, taught in every law faculty, reinforced in every judicial training programme, and established in countless appellate decisions at every level of the Nigerian court system. A first-year magistrate knows this rule. A judge with 14 years of experience on the federal bench cannot credibly claim ignorance of it.
Nigerian lawyers often say that “the court is not Father Christmas” meaning that a court can only grant the reliefs specifically sought by the parties, and not what was never asked for.
On January 30, 2026, Justice Agomoh delivered a judgment in the Federal High Court, Ibadan, in which she declared the caretaker committee led by Abdurahman Mohammed and Samuel Anyanwu as the legitimate leadership faction of the PDP.
The problem, as the Court of Appeal subsequently found, was that no party before her court had sought this declaration. The parties had come to court with their own specific reliefs, their own specific prayers, and their own specific claims. What they had not asked for was a declaration recognising the Abdurahman Mohammed-led caretaker committee. Yet that is precisely what Justice Agomoh granted.
The Court of Appeal’s findings can be distilled into five devastating conclusions about the trial court’s conduct.
First, Justice Agomoh granted reliefs that nobody asked for. The appellate court found that she went beyond the case before her by recognising a factional caretaker committee as the legitimate PDP leadership, even though that was not a relief sought by any party. When a court grants a declaration that no party requested, the natural question is in whose interest the court was acting, because it was plainly not acting in response to any party’s prayer.
Second, the Court of Appeal held that the trial court exceeded its proper powers. The appellate court was unambiguous: where a court goes outside the claims before it, the resulting judgment is not merely erroneous but is a nullity.
Third, the judgment was declared a nullity liable to be set aside “ex debito justitiae,” meaning as a debt of justice, as a matter of right, not as a matter of discretion. This is the strongest language available to an appellate court short of an express finding of bad faith.
Fourth, the Court of Appeal held that no retrial was necessary because the Supreme Court had already nullified the PDP’s Ibadan Convention of November 15-16, 2025, from which the caretaker committee derived its authority. The appellate court warned that ordering a retrial “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.”
Fifth, the court held that the entire appeal had become academic: “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 Court of Appeal did not expressly find corruption, bias, or deliberate misconduct on Justice Agomoh’s part. Appellate courts typically confine themselves to the legal merits of the judgment under review and do not make findings of personal misconduct against the trial judge. That function belongs to the NJC.
But the nature of the overreach in this case makes the question unavoidable: why would a judge with 14 years of experience grant a declaration that no party sought?
If it was a genuine error, it was an error of extraordinary magnitude on a point of extraordinary simplicity. A judge who does not know that she cannot grant reliefs that nobody asked for has a gap in her legal knowledge so fundamental that it calls into question her fitness for the bench, not because mistakes cannot happen, but because this particular mistake is the equivalent of a surgeon forgetting to wash their hands. It is so basic that its occurrence invites the inference that something other than mere oversight was at work.
If it was not an error, then the question becomes what influenced the judgment. In the highly charged context of PDP factional litigation, where different factions have been seeking judicial validation for competing leadership claims across multiple courts in multiple states, the possibility that a judge might be influenced by considerations outside the record, whether political pressure, factional interests, or other improper factors, is not merely theoretical. It is a concern that the pattern of conflicting court orders across the PDP litigation landscape has repeatedly raised.
The fact that Justice Agomoh’s judgment specifically recognised the Abdurahman Mohammed-led faction, a specific outcome that aligned with one side of the PDP’s internal power struggle, despite that recognition not being among the reliefs sought by any party, makes the question of external influence impossible to dismiss as mere speculation.
The affected parties, whether the PDP faction disadvantaged by Justice Agomoh’s judgment, the party’s national leadership, or any stakeholder with standing, should file a petition with the National Judicial Council requesting an investigation into the circumstances surrounding this judgment.
The NJC, established under Section 153(1)(i) of the 1999 Constitution, is the body constitutionally mandated to investigate complaints of judicial misconduct and to recommend appropriate sanctions. Its jurisdiction extends to determining whether a judge’s conduct in a particular case was the result of a genuine legal error, which would not ordinarily warrant disciplinary action, or whether it involved misconduct, bias, or improper influence, which would.
A petition to the NJC in this case would not prejudge the outcome. It would present the Court of Appeal’s findings, highlight the elementary nature of the rule that was violated, note the politically sensitive context in which the overreach occurred, and request the council to investigate whether the judgment reflected a bona fide mistake or whether there is evidence of improper conduct.
The NJC has demonstrated in recent years that it is willing to investigate and sanction judges whose conduct in politically sensitive cases falls below acceptable standards. In the Secondus case involving the PDP’s earlier leadership crisis, three judges were sanctioned for issuing conflicting orders. That precedent establishes that the NJC will act where judicial conduct in political party litigation raises concerns about the integrity of the process.
Justice Agomoh’s case is, in significant respects, more concerning than the Secondus precedent. Those judges were sanctioned for issuing conflicting orders, which, while problematic, could at least be attributed to the chaos of multiple courts hearing related matters simultaneously. Justice Agomoh’s case involves a single judge granting a declaration that nobody asked for, recognising a political faction that nobody requested her to recognise, and doing so on a foundation (the Ibadan convention) that the Supreme Court subsequently nullified. The overreach was not a product of confusion caused by competing jurisdictions; it was a product of the trial court’s own initiative in granting what nobody sought.
The broader concern is that the current system does not adequately deter judicial overreach in politically sensitive cases. If judges can grant reliefs that no party sought, recognise factional leaders that no party asked to be recognised, and build judgments on foundations that superior courts have already destroyed, without facing any professional consequences beyond having their judgments overturned on appeal, the incentive structure does not discourage such conduct.
Appellate reversal, by itself, is not a sufficient consequence. A judge whose politically consequential judgment is overturned months or years later has already achieved whatever effect the judgment was intended to produce during the period between its delivery and its reversal. Political realities on the ground change, factional positions harden, and the interim effect of the voided judgment may have permanently altered the dynamics of the dispute it purported to resolve.
If the only consequence for a judge who grants unsought reliefs in a political case is that the judgment is eventually set aside on appeal, the message to other judges is clear: the upside of overreach is immediate and impactful, while the downside is delayed and limited. Only NJC investigation and the possibility of disciplinary action can alter this calculus and create real consequences for judicial conduct that the Court of Appeal has described as producing “a nullity.”
The affected parties should petition the NJC without delay. The petition should set out the Court of Appeal’s findings in full, including the specific language describing the judgment as a nullity, the finding that the trial court went outside the reliefs sought, and the appellate court’s observation that the legal foundation for the entire judgment had been destroyed by the Supreme Court.
The petition should ask the NJC to investigate whether Justice Agomoh’s conduct in delivering the January 30 judgment constitutes judicial misconduct, and specifically whether granting a major political declaration that no party sought, in the context of a factional leadership dispute, was a bona fide legal error or was influenced by considerations that do not appear on the record.
The NJC investigation would provide Justice Agomoh with an opportunity to explain her reasoning, present any justification for her approach, and respond to the concerns raised. If the NJC finds that the judgment was a genuine legal error made in good faith, the matter can be resolved through a caution or guidance. If the investigation reveals evidence of improper conduct, the NJC has the power to recommend sanctions up to and including removal from the bench.
What cannot happen is nothing. A judgment that the Court of Appeal described as “a nullity and liable to be set aside ex debito justitiae” for granting reliefs that no party sought, delivered by a judge with 14 years of experience, in a case involving the leadership of Nigeria’s main opposition party, cannot simply be absorbed into the routine statistics of appellate reversals. The nature of the overreach, the elementary nature of the rule that was violated, and the politically charged context in which it occurred all demand accountability beyond the appellate process.
COURT OF APPEAL JUDGEMENT JUSTICE AGOMOH
The affected parties have not publicly indicated whether they intend to petition the NJC or appeal the judgment.
The Court of Appeal judgment was delivered by Justice Uchechukwu Onyemenam, with Justices Mohammed Mustapha and Okon Abang concurring.
The post “Was It A Legal Error Or Something More?” — 14 Years On The Bench, Yet Justice Agomoh Granted Reliefs No Party Sought appeared first on TheNigeriaLawyer.
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