The leadership crisis rocking Nigeria’s Labour Party shows no signs of abating, as former national chairman Julius Abure has flatly rejected a Court of Appeal judgment affirming Senator Nenadi Usman as the party’s legitimate leader and has pledged to escalate the battle to the Supreme Court.
In what is fast becoming one of the most protracted internal party disputes in recent Nigerian political history, Abure issued a combative statement on Tuesday, hours after the Court of Appeal, in a lead judgment delivered by Justice Oyejoju Oyewumi, dismissed his appeal challenging Usman’s leadership.
Far from conceding, the embattled former chairman declared the ruling “unacceptable” and vowed to fight on, setting the stage for yet another round of high-stakes litigation that could further destabilize one of the country’s most prominent opposition parties.
“We have seen what transpired today at the Appeal Court, and we want to say very clearly that the judgment is not acceptable to all of us in the Labour Party led by my humble self,” Abure said in the statement, in a pointed assertion that he still considers himself the party’s rightful head—a position the courts have repeatedly rejected.
To understand the full weight of Tuesday’s judgment, one must trace this dispute back to its origins. The trouble began when the Supreme Court, on April 4, 2025, nullified the convention that had purportedly returned Abure as national chairman, thereby recognizing Usman, a former minister of finance and two-term senator, as the party’s legitimate leader.
Abure subsequently challenged a January 21 ruling by Justice Peter Lifu of the Federal High Court, which reaffirmed the Supreme Court’s decision and directed the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to recognize Usman as the party’s authentic leader “to the exclusion of all others.” The Court of Appeal, on Tuesday, agreed with the lower court in its entirety, a double judicial rebuff that many legal analysts would consider decisive.
Yet Abure remains undeterred.
Central to Abure’s argument is his insistence that the courts are trespassing on the internal affairs of a political party, a principle he claims the Nigerian judiciary has itself repeatedly upheld.
“The courts, the Supreme Court, and all courts in Nigeria have stated very clearly that the issues of leadership of a political party is an internal affair of a political party,” he argued, in a legal reasoning that sits in awkward tension with the fact that it is he, not his opponents, who has been repeatedly dragging those same internal affairs before the courts.
He also took direct aim at the court’s finding that the tenure of the National Working Committee he led had expired, insisting that the Labour Party national convention held in Nnewi on March 27, 2024, remains “valid and subsisting for four years.” In his telling, the appellate court erred fatally by failing to give adequate weight to that convention before concluding that his tenure had lapsed.
“It is not true, and I disagree when people say that the tenure of this executive has expired,” he said. “That is untrue and very unacceptable to us.”
At the heart of this legal battle lies a fundamental disagreement over which of two competing party events carries constitutional weight.
Abure clings to the Nnewi convention as his source of legitimacy. The courts, however, have consistently sided with the Umuahia meeting, the gathering at which a caretaker committee was constituted under Usman’s leadership.
Abure dismisses that meeting as unconstitutional, arguing that only a sitting National Chairman and National Secretary possess the authority to convene any NEC meeting.
The Court of Appeal, however, took a starkly different view. It upheld the constitution of the Caretaker Committee under the doctrine of necessity, a legal principle invoked when extraordinary circumstances demand urgent action to fill a leadership vacuum, even if the precise procedural requirements cannot be met.
In the court’s reading, the Labour Party was in a state of institutional paralysis, and the Umuahia meeting was a necessary corrective measure, not an unconstitutional coup.
The appellate court additionally affirmed that under Section 251 of the Constitution, the Federal High Court had the lawful authority to compel a statutory federal agency, in this case INEC, to perform its duties, including recognizing the rightful party leadership. This legal point is significant: it forecloses any argument that INEC could, or should, look away from a direct court order.
For Senator Nenadi Usman, the judgment was an occasion for measured triumph. In a statement released through her office, she described the ruling as “a victory for democracy and the rule of law” and commended the judiciary for what she called its courage and commitment to justice even in the face of what she characterized as deliberate attempts by unnamed individuals to undermine the integrity of the courts.
Her camp will take particular comfort from the appellate court’s unambiguous language: the Supreme Court, it held, had conclusively settled this dispute as far back as April 2025. Every subsequent legal action by Abure, in this reading, amounts to a rearguard effort to relitigate a battle that was already lost.
Despite the weight of judicial opinion stacked against him, Abure has instructed his legal team to prepare a fresh appeal to the Supreme Court, the very court that, in April 2025, issued the ruling that first stripped him of his chairmanship.
“Today’s decision of the Appeal Court is not acceptable to us, and we reject it in its entirety. We have put our legal team together, and we are going to file an appeal and move to the Supreme Court,” he declared.
The implications for the Labor Party, which rode a remarkable wave of popular enthusiasm during the 2023 presidential election, are sobering. Every court appearance, every press statement of rejection, every new appeal filing deepens a crisis of identity and legitimacy that has left the party structurally weakened and politically distracted at a time when Nigeria’s opposition space demands coherence and focus.
For ordinary Nigerians who invested hope in the labor party as a genuine alternative to the dominant political establishment, the spectacle of a party tearing itself apart in the courts is a dispiriting one.
Whether the Supreme Court will entertain yet another appeal on a matter it has already ruled upon remains to be seen, but if Tuesday’s reactions are any indication, the curtain on this political drama is far from falling.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
The Labor Party’s leadership crisis remains far from over. Despite multiple court rulings, including a Supreme Court judgment, a Federal High Court reaffirmation, and now a Court of Appeal dismissal, all consistently recognizing Senator Nenadi Usman as the party’s legitimate leader, Julius Abure refuses to stand down and is heading back to the Supreme Court.
