Court of Appeal Calls Justice Lifu’s Conduct “the Highest Form of Judicial Impertinence,” Grants Stay of Execution of Party Deregistration Judgment, as Okutepa SAN Says Judge Committed “Judicial Insubordination,” Lawyers Allege Chief Judge Tsoho Is “Trapped” by Asset Declaration Scandal and a Minister Controls His Court, INEC Reveals It Was Not Invited to the Judgment, and Questions Mount Over the “Incorporated Trustees of National Forum of Former Legislators” and Their Links to the Presidency
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The Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja has granted a stay of execution of the Federal High Court judgment that directed INEC to deregister the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Action People’s Party (APP), Action Alliance (AA), Accord Party, and Zenith Labour Party (ZLP), in a unanimous decision that went far beyond a routine appellate intervention by describing Justice Peter Lifu’s conduct in delivering the judgment despite a subsisting stay order as “the highest form of judicial impertinence,” invoking the Supreme Court’s characterisation of judges who act in such manner as “unfit for the bench.”
The appellate court’s ruling has triggered a cascade of reactions from senior lawyers, analysts, and political figures, all of whom have condemned Justice Lifu’s conduct in extraordinary terms, with several drawing a direct line between the judgment and what they describe as the compromised state of the Federal High Court leadership under Chief Judge Justice John Tsoho, whose undeclared bank accounts, his wife’s alleged interception with $160,000 in cash, and the reported intervention of a South-South cabinet minister to protect him from accountability, have allegedly left the court’s leadership unable or unwilling to control judges operating on political missions.
What the Court of Appeal Said
A three-member panel led by Justice A.B. Mohammed held that Justice Lifu’s decision to proceed with the judgment despite its order of May 22, 2026, staying proceedings amounted to “an affront to the hierarchy of courts.”
“Courts are enjoined to protect their integrity. This court has supervisory authority over the trial court. The decision of the lower court to proceed with the judgment despite the express order of this court is a brazen violation of the hierarchy of the court and the 1999 Constitution,” the appellate court held.
The court invoked the Supreme Court’s language, stating that a judge who acts in such manner is “unfit for the bench” and that such conduct constitutes “judicial rascality.”
“The application for stay of execution is hereby granted. The enforcement of the judgment is stayed,” the court ruled.
Okutepa SAN: “Judicial Insubordination, Judicial Impertinence”
Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Jibrin Okutepa, SAN, who recently served as lead counsel to Senator David Mark in ADC matters, described Justice Lifu’s conduct as “judicial insubordination” and “judicial impertinence.”
“What happened appears to be judicial insubordination, judicial impertinence, and it ought not to be so and should not be so,” Okutepa stated on Channels Television’s Politics Today.
He explained the legal framework in unequivocal terms: “The duty under our law is for the lower court to bow, to pay due obedience to an order from the higher court.”
Okutepa stated that the Court of Appeal had stayed proceedings on May 22, 2026, and that Justice Lifu should have stopped immediately once notified: “The moment he sees the copy of the order, without any further ado, he must stop reading the judgment at that stage, because proceeding stay includes judgment delivery.”
He described Justice Lifu’s defiance as a violation of Section 287 of the Constitution: “It is a violation of Nigerian Constitution Section 287 for the trial court to ignore that order and proceed to deliver judgment. So if I was sitting in the seat of their lordships, I would have been harder.”
Okutepa compared the judge’s conduct to a child confronting his father: “Stay proceedings means don’t touch. And once that is ordered, then to proceed to deliver a judgment in the face of a valid order, in defiance of that order, is equivalent to saying that a child looks at his father directly to the face and says, ‘Daddy, you are stupid.’ On that, he shouldn’t be encouraged.”
He said the conduct appeared serious enough to raise questions of judicial misconduct: “I am not in a position to determine whether it is judicial misconduct or not, but it appears to be so. So those who feel aggrieved know what to do.”
Oshoma: “INEC Told the Court These Parties Met the Threshold”
Lawyer Liberous Oshoma, speaking on Arise News, faulted the judgment on multiple grounds. He noted that INEC itself had deposed to a counter-affidavit stating that the affected parties had met the constitutional threshold under Section 225A.
“The agency that is empowered to deregister had said these parties have complied. We had carried out the registration process. These people are mere busybodies. This is frivolous. And so these political parties have made the threshold. That alone should have ended the matter there,” Oshoma stated.
He pointed out that several of the deregistered parties had won elections: “ADC won House of Representatives seats in the 2023 election. ZLP won couple of seats. Virtually all the parties that were deregistered passed the threshold. Is it that the judge did not even see it at all?”
On the Court of Appeal stay order, Oshoma stated: “The Court of Appeal granted an application for stay of proceedings pending appeal around May 22nd. It is a notorious fact that most times, once an appeal is entered, the court of first instance usually distances itself from going ahead with proceedings.”
Tietie: “He Was on a Mission to Cause Anarchy”
Arise News analyst and lawyer Frank Tietie delivered the most forceful condemnation: “Justice Peter Lifu was on a mission to cause anarchy. And he needed such kind of a reprimand. He has attempted to destroy the very foundation of the Nigerian legal system, which is the principle of judicial precedence and the hierarchy of courts.”
Tietie described the judgment as “a hatchet job” and predicted NJC consequences: “I know the National Judicial Council will be waiting for him.”
INEC Was Not Even Invited
A critical detail emerged during media analysis: INEC, the constitutional body that administers the register of political parties and is the respondent in the suit, was reportedly not formally invited to the judgment delivery.
“INEC was not even invited to that judgment yesterday. They only read about it in the media when we broke the news,” Arise News’ Sunday Sambo reported. “How could you have been given such a judgment that would affect me, who is the regulator, and you didn’t even invite me to witness it?”
He added that the judgment was delivered with approximately two hours’ notice, with lawyers summoned as if through “Gestapo tactics.”
The Tsoho Connection: A Chief Judge “Trapped”
Lawyers and analysts have drawn a direct line between Justice Lifu’s conduct and the ongoing scandal surrounding Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, Justice John Tsoho, whose undeclared bank accounts and the reported intervention of a South-South cabinet minister to shield him from investigation, have created what lawyers describe as a situation where the Chief Judge is “trapped” and unable to exercise control over his court.
The Justice Tsoho case has been described as one of the most serious judicial accountability failures in recent Nigerian history. A Premium Times investigation revealed that Justice Tsoho allegedly failed to declare three accounts with United Bank for Africa and one with Access Bank in his asset declaration form submitted to the Code of Conduct Bureau on April 29, 2024.
His wife was reportedly intercepted by EFCC operatives while travelling to Benue State and returned to Abuja, with $160,000 in cash allegedly found in her possession. Neither the EFCC nor the Chief Judge’s office has issued an official statement on the circumstances.
The NJC had scheduled an urgent meeting for March 6 to deliberate on the allegations but cancelled it abruptly the night before, reportedly to allow more time for behind-the-scenes efforts to persuade the President to intervene. No new date has been announced.
A South-South cabinet minister was reported to have lobbied the President to prevent the case from proceeding, with sources describing the minister as having “a vested interest in keeping the courts friendly ahead of the 2027 political cycle.”
Lawyers contend that this environment, where the Chief Judge himself is under a cloud of investigation from which he has been rescued by political intervention, has created conditions where judges like Justice Lifu can operate with impunity because the leadership of the Federal High Court has lost the moral authority and institutional independence to discipline them.
“From the head to the bottom, everyone is encouraging corruption in the judiciary. The NJC is not acting. The NBA is protecting. The CCB is being blocked. A cabinet minister is lobbying. The President is silent. Every judge in Nigeria is watching this case, and the message they are getting is: do whatever you want, nobody will hold you accountable,” a source familiar with the case stated.
The NBA, rather than demanding answers about Justice Tsoho’s undeclared accounts, wrote to the CCB arguing that it cannot investigate a serving judicial officer without first going through the NJC, effectively creating what critics describe as a bureaucratic dead-end. The CCB cannot act because the NBA says only the NJC can. The NJC cancelled its meeting. The EFCC is silent. The President has not taken a position.
The comparison with former CJN Walter Onnoghen, who was arraigned, tried, convicted, and removed from office in weeks for failing to declare bank accounts, has been inevitable. “Why did the system move at lightning speed against Onnoghen but has gone completely silent on Tsoho?” observers have asked.
Case Allocation Concerns Trail Justice Lifu
Meanwhile, concerns over Justice Lifu’s case allocation have revived wider questions about transparency in the Federal High Court, especially in politically sensitive matters. While the court’s Practice Directions regulate daily workload by limiting a judge’s cause list and requiring proper time management, critics argue that the deeper concern is the repeated appearance of major opposition-related cases before particular judges. They say such patterns, whether coincidental or not, can weaken public confidence in the neutrality of the judiciary and fuel suspicion about the case assignment process.
The Plaintiff: Who Are They?
Significant questions have been raised about the Incorporated Trustees of the National Forum of Former Legislators, the group that brought the deregistration suit.
Sunday Sambo of Arise News revealed that the group’s connection to the Presidency is well-documented: “There was a summit sometime last year of national former legislators where they met with this same former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Femi Gbajabiamila,” who is now Chief of Staff to President Tinubu. “There are so many of them, former Senate Presidents, former Speakers, all coordinated by the office of the Chief of Staff to the President. They endorsed President Bola Tinubu.”
Sambo added: “There’s also another gentleman, a former member of the House of Representatives, that’s close to the same Chief of Staff to the President that led this National Association of Former Legislators, which is now making the opposition call the name of the Chief of Staff.”
He further revealed that when the group initially filed the case, “they already knew that they were not registered. They had to quickly go back and change and amend the name to now Incorporated Trustees.”
Multiple commentators questioned the group’s locus standi. Okutepa SAN asked: “What was the locus standi of these people that describe themselves as the Incorporated Trustees of National Forum of Former Legislators? Where is their letter of demand? Where is the failure of INEC? When INEC came and supplied evidence saying from my record, and even gave statistics of who won what.”
Oshoma stated: “They have not shown in any way any injustice that they will suffer. They have also not shown any link to whether as members of political parties or as lawmakers who had made laws and that these laws are observed in breach.”
The IPAC National Chairman stated bluntly: “You have been an unsuccessful politician, and you decided to go to court. Somebody will push you to go to court to achieve the purpose.”
Frank Tietie connected the dots: “This is what we refer to in legal, in practical parlance, as a hatchet job.”
Gbajabiamila’s Name Keeps Coming Up
Chief of Staff Femi Gbajabiamila’s name has featured prominently in the analysis. Sambo of Arise Tv noted previous incidents linking the Chief of Staff’s office to interference with opposition parties: the alleged influence over an ADC House of Representatives member who defected to the APC, and comments attributed to Gbajabiamila at an event telling an opposition lawmaker to “go ahead, remain in the party, fight them, destroy them.”
“So people have been putting things together. That’s why you see opposition politicians now linking it,” Sambo stated, while urging Gbajabiamila to publicly clarify his office’s position so that President Tinubu is “not accused unduly.”
Neither the Chief of Staff’s office nor the Incorporated Trustees of the National Forum of Former Legislators has publicly responded to the allegations linking them to the Presidency or explaining who funded the litigation.
Justice Lifu Refuses to Recuse from ADC Leadership Case
In a development that has further fuelled concerns, Justice Lifu on Tuesday, the day after the deregistration judgment, refused to recuse himself from a separate suit challenging the legality of the Senator David Mark-led ADC leadership, despite applications from multiple defendants.
In Suit No. FHC/ABJ/CS/1819/2025, brought by former ADC National Deputy Chairman Nafiu Bala Gombe challenging the Mark-Aregbesola leadership, Justice Lifu dismissed the recusal applications as “baseless, unmeritorious and unsupported by cogent and verifiable evidence.”
He stated: “No responsible court of record will dance to the whims and caprices of a litigant. No court must fall to cheap blackmail and intimidation. As for me, I can never be intimidated or harassed. A judge must be bold, courageous and firm.”
He imposed costs of N500,000 each against Senator Mark and Aregbesola, and fixed June 23 for accelerated hearing.
Defendants’ counsel had argued that since Justice Lifu’s own court had ordered the ADC deregistered the previous day, the party was effectively “dead” and could not be the subject of further adjudication before the same judge. Justice Lifu directed them to first read the certified true copy of the deregistration judgment, saying the two cases were different.
The defendants also informed the court that the ADC had petitioned both Justice Lifu and the Chief Judge to the NJC over the handling of legal disputes involving the party.
“President Tinubu Should Be Careful”
Multiple commentators warned that the political fallout from the deregistration judgment and its judicial aftermath risked damaging President Tinubu himself.
The IPAC National Chairman stated: “President Tinubu should be very careful with some people who are claiming to be supporting him. This overdrive, this overzealousness, is making people lose interest in him. It’s making him very unpopular.”
Frank Tietie added: “If President Tinubu wins the election, let it be that he won fairly and not because he stifled opposition voices or derailed democratic principles.”
Sunday Sambo concluded with the question that has defined the controversy: “Who benefits from the deregistration of these political parties? That’s the basic question.”
The five political parties remain registered following the Court of Appeal’s stay of execution. Justice Lifu’s judgment cannot be enforced pending further appellate proceedings. The NJC has been urged by multiple parties to investigate Justice Lifu’s conduct. INEC has confirmed through its counter-affidavit that the affected parties met the constitutional threshold. The Chief Judge under whose administrative authority Justice Lifu operates remains mired in an unresolved asset declaration scandal. And the group that brought the suit has been publicly linked to the office of the Chief of Staff to the President.
The affected parties are expected to pursue the substantive appeal seeking to set aside Justice Lifu’s judgment entirely. The Court of Appeal’s description of the conduct as “judicial rascality” and the judge as potentially “unfit for the bench” provides a strong indication of how the appellate court views the merits of the underlying judgment.
The Court of Appeal’s stay order was granted on Tuesday, June 16, 2026. Justice Lifu’s refusal to recuse himself from the ADC leadership case occurred on the same day.
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