A Federal High Court in Abuja ordered Nigeria’s electoral commission on Monday to deregister five political parties, a ruling that has thrown the pre-election calculations of some of the country’s most prominent politicians into sudden disorder with less than a year to go before the 2027 general elections.
Justice Peter Lifu, delivering judgment in a suit brought by the National Forum of Former Legislators, directed the Independent National Electoral Commission to remove the African Democratic Congress, the Action Peoples Party, Action Alliance, the Accord Party, and the Zenith Labour Party from its register of recognised parties. The court found that all five had failed to meet the electoral performance benchmarks set out in Section 225A of the 1999 Constitution and the Electoral Act 2022 — benchmarks that require a party to either win at least one elective seat at the federal, state, or local government level, or secure at least 25 percent of votes cast in a state during a presidential election.
The ruling lands with particular force on two men who had been banking on those parties as vehicles for political ambition. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who had migrated to the ADC after his third consecutive defeat on the Peoples Democratic Party platform in 2023, now finds his path to the 2027 presidential race suddenly complicated. Osun State Governor Ademola Adeleke, whose governorship was won on the Accord Party ticket, faces similar uncertainty heading into the 2026 Osun election. Neither man has publicly responded to Monday’s ruling.
The legal argument behind the case is not new, but the timing makes it sharper. Nigerian law has long provided a mechanism for clearing out parties that exist more on paper than in practice — organisations that field candidates, collect registration fees, occasionally serve as platforms for political maneuvering, but never win the votes that would justify their continued official existence. INEC deregistered 74 parties in 2020 on similar grounds, a decision the Supreme Court subsequently upheld. Monday’s ruling is an extension of that logic, applied now on the eve of an election cycle in which the proliferation of weak parties has become a standing complaint of electoral reformers.
The court heard that the five parties in question performed poorly across both the 2023 general elections and subsequent by-elections, failing to return a single candidate to any meaningful office at the federal or state level. The National Forum of Former Legislators, which brought the suit, argued that allowing them to remain registered was not merely untidy but actively unconstitutional — a dereliction by INEC of a duty the law made mandatory rather than discretionary.
Whether the ruling survives appeal is another question. The affected parties are widely expected to challenge it, and with primary election timelines and candidate substitution windows already the subject of separate litigation — a Federal High Court nullified INEC’s revised timetable last month — the judiciary has become, once again, the arena in which Nigeria’s political class is fighting the battles it cannot win at the ballot box.
For the broader health of Nigerian democracy, the picture the ruling draws is not entirely flattering. A multiparty system in which parties are deregistered by court order weeks before elections begin to take shape, in which prominent politicians migrate between platforms serially rather than building durable organisations, and in which the courts are asked to do the work that voters and party structures should have done long before, is a system still searching for stability. The mechanism for clearing out underperforming parties exists and is now being enforced. What it cannot enforce is the discipline of political parties that take democratic institution-building seriously in the first place.
