The Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja on Thursday vacated a judgment that had nullified the timelines issued by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the 2027 general elections.
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A unanimous three-member panel upheld as meritorious an appeal filed by the electoral body against the judgment delivered by the Federal High Court on May 20. The appellate court held that the trial court failed to follow binding precedents, ruling that INEC’s Revised Timetable for the general elections qualifies as subsidiary legislation to the 2026 Electoral Act, carrying the same force of law as the Act itself. It found that INEC had acted within its statutory powers and that every deadline in the Revised Timetable fell within the ambit of the Electoral Act.
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INEC’s notice of appeal, dated May 25, raised nine grounds urging the appellate court to vacate the high court judgment. Among its arguments, the commission contended that the high court erred by failing to determine a jurisdictional issue it had raised, and maintained that the suit filed against it by the Youth Party (YP) was hypothetical and academic in nature. It argued that the trial court’s failure to rule on these issues amounted to a denial of fair hearing. INEC further contended that the lower court’s verdict ran contrary to the weight of evidence before it, and urged the appellate court to strike out YP’s case entirely for lack of locus standi.
Background to the Dispute
The case stemmed from a suit filed by YP seeking to compel INEC to comply with the Electoral Act 2026’s 120-day pre-election deadline for submitting party registers and candidates’ personal particulars. INEC was the sole defendant in the suit, marked FHC/ABJ/CS/517/2016.
YP had asked the court to determine that INEC’s statutory powers to receive notice of party primaries and monitor them did not extend to fixing the timetable within which parties conduct their primaries for the 2027 polls.
Justice Mohammed Umar, ruling in YP’s favour, had invalidated INEC’s timeline for party primaries and candidate nomination, and set aside the commission’s May 10 deadline requiring parties to submit membership registers as a condition for participating in the elections. He held that the timeframes INEC imposed for primaries and for submitting, withdrawing, or replacing candidates were inconsistent with the Electoral Act, 2026.
Citing Section 29(1) of the Act, which sets a 120-day deadline for submitting candidates’ particulars, Justice Umar had ruled that INEC could not lawfully shorten that period through its own timetable. He applied similar reasoning to Section 31, governing the 90-day window for candidate withdrawal and substitution, and Section 32, which sets a 60-day minimum before the final candidate list is published — finding in each case that INEC lacked the power to impose earlier deadlines than the Act prescribes.
With Thursday’s ruling, the Court of Appeal has reversed that position, affirming INEC’s authority to set the timelines as issued.
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