By Alex Ter Adum, PhD
Okoi Obono-Obla’s attempt to defend Justice Peter Lifu’s judgment by arguing that it does not conflict with Justice Musa Liman’s earlier judgment is an exercise in ingenious but fundamentally flawed legal reasoning.
His argument rests on four propositions: that the two plaintiffs were different; that their capacities were different; that Liman decided only preliminary questions; and that the earlier judgment was neither pleaded nor tendered before Lifu.
None of these propositions, individually or collectively, resolves the fundamental legal question: whether a judge of the Federal High Court could make orders that effectively nullified a leadership transition and consequential decisions already considered and protected by a subsisting judgment of another judge of the same court.
He confuses res judicata with the prohibition against judicial overreach by a court of coordinate jurisdiction.
This is the most fundamental defect in his analysis.
The principle that a court of coordinate jurisdiction cannot sit on appeal over the decision of another court of equal jurisdiction is not synonymous with res judicata.
Res judicata concerns the conclusiveness of a matter previously adjudicated between parties or their privies, subject to the established requirements of the doctrine.
The prohibition against a coordinate court reviewing or nullifying the decision of another concerns judicial hierarchy, institutional discipline, finality of adjudication and the orderly administration of justice.
One does not automatically depend on the other.
Consequently, even if Obono-Obla successfully argues that Bala and Abejide were different plaintiffs, that does not answer whether Justice Lifu could make orders that contradicted the subsisting judicial disposition of the same leadership transition.
The authorities in N.I.M.B. Ltd v U.B.N. Ltd, Witt & Busch Ltd v Dale Power Systems Plc and Cole v Martins underscore the importance of respecting the decisions and jurisdictional boundaries of courts of coordinate competence.
The question is not whether Lifu was bound to adopt every sentence in Liman’s judgment as binding precedent. He was not.
The question is whether he could effectively overturn the judicial consequences of that judgment through a subsequent proceeding.
He could not.
The attempt to reduce Liman’s judgment to a mere dismissal in limine is a serious misrepresentation of its judicial significance.
Obono-Obla repeatedly asserts that Liman merely declined jurisdiction, upheld objections on locus standi and non-justiciability, and therefore never determined the legitimacy of the Mark-led leadership.
That characterisation requires a much closer examination of the actual judgment.
The reported proceedings involved the legality of Ralph Nwosu’s departure and handover, the emergence of David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola, the 29 July 2025 NEC meeting, the applicable provisions of the ADC Constitution and the Electoral Act, and INEC’s notice and monitoring of the transition.
The reported findings did not exist in a vacuum.
Liman’s judicial consideration of those matters cannot simply be erased from the legal history of the case by attaching the expression in limine to the eventual dismissal.
The critical question is what the judge actually determined, what findings were necessary to his decision, and what his enrolled orders directed.
If, as the judgment and its operative orders establish, Liman judicially sustained the transition or made consequential orders protecting the Mark-led leadership, Lifu could not subsequently render those orders ineffective.
A preliminary objection does not retrospectively convert every judicial finding made in the proceedings into a legal nullity.
Obono-Obla cannot have it both ways: he cannot minimise the legal significance of Liman’s judgment while simultaneously relying on its dismissal to argue that the earlier proceedings have no bearing whatsoever on the subsequent adjudication.
The certified judgment, not a convenient characterisation of it, must determine the issue.
The distinction between Abejide and Bala is artificial because it ignores their established representative relationship and common cause of action.
Obono-Obla’s most audacious argument is that Abejide was an ordinary party member, whereas Bala was a Deputy National Chairman with a subsisting tenure and therefore a direct personal interest in the leadership dispute.
This is a convenient distinction, but it is not a complete statement of the facts.
Abejide was not an uninvolved party member who stumbled into the leadership dispute. His participation was connected to the same factional leadership contest, the same challenge to the Nwosu-to-Mark transition and the same effort to prevent INEC from recognising the Mark-led leadership.
More significantly, the relationship between Bala and Abejide was not merely coincidental. Their participation in the proceedings, their coordinated pursuit of the same political objective and their joint protests against INEC in Abuja demonstrate a common representative interest. They operated as a tag team in pursuing the same leadership grievance.
The law does not determine privity exclusively by examining whether two litigants occupy identical constitutional offices within an organisation.
A person may be a privy of another through a representative relationship, common interest in the subject matter or participation in litigation in a capacity that legally connects their interests.
The proper inquiry is whether the earlier proceedings adequately represented the interest subsequently asserted, whether the parties were litigating the same underlying controversy and whether the later action seeks to reopen matters already adjudicated.
Consequently, Bala cannot escape the legal consequences of the earlier proceedings merely by commencing another action in his individual name or presenting his grievance through a different description of his party office.
The substance of the litigation matters more than the cosmetics of the pleadings.
Different reliefs do not give a coordinate court permission to contradict an earlier judicial determination.
This is another weakness in Obono-Obla’s reasoning.
He suggests that because Abejide and Bala sought different reliefs, Lifu was entitled to determine the latter’s action independently.
But different reliefs do not necessarily translate into different causes of action or different essential questions requiring judicial determination.
The central controversy in both proceedings was the legality of the same transition from Ralph Nwosu to David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola, including the validity of the 29 July 2025 NEC meeting and the consequential recognition of the new leadership by INEC.
The fact that one claimant framed his grievance around the legality of the transition while another asserted an entitlement to succeed to the leadership does not eliminate the common substratum of the dispute.
Indeed, the court must look beyond the language of the reliefs to identify the substance of the controversy.
If the legality of the same leadership transition was already judicially considered, a subsequent claimant cannot simply repackage the controversy and invite another judge of equal jurisdiction to reach an inconsistent conclusion.
Otherwise, every litigant dissatisfied with a judicial outcome could recruit another party, formulate a slightly different relief and obtain a second judgment from another judge of the same court.
That would make judicial finality an illusion.
His argument about the absence of Liman’s judgment from the record is speculative and legally overstated.
Obono-Obla argues that because the reported Lifu judgment does not expressly identify Liman’s judgment as an exhibit, the ADC cannot complain that Lifu disregarded it.
This is an astonishingly premature conclusion.
First, a newspaper report of a judgment is not the complete record of proceedings. The absence of a reference in a media report does not establish that the judgment was neither brought to the court’s attention nor addressed in the proceedings.
The proper inquiry is the certified record, including the pleadings, applications, exhibits, proceedings and final judgment.
Second, the coordinate-jurisdiction argument is not exhausted by the technical requirements of pleading res judicata. It raises an independent question of judicial propriety and the competence of a judge to make orders inconsistent with an existing judicial disposition.
Third, even where an argument was not adequately canvassed at trial, the appellate court must examine whether the proposed ground raises a pure question of law, whether it requires additional evidence and whether leave is necessary under the applicable appellate rules.
Obono-Obla cannot transform a potentially procedural difficulty into an automatic substantive validation of Lifu’s judgment.
His argument that Lifu could not have considered what was not tendered may be relevant to the procedural history. It does not establish that the judgment Lifu subsequently delivered was legally incapable of contradicting an earlier subsisting judgment.
The distinction is elementary.
The real contradiction is in the judicial outcomes, not merely in the identities of the plaintiffs.
Let us strip away the elaborate distinctions.
Liman’s proceedings concerned the legality of the emergence of the Mark-led leadership through the Nwosu handover and the 29 July 2025 NEC meeting.
Lifu’s proceedings also concerned the legality of that same transition.
Liman’s judgment left the Mark-led leadership standing and, on the reported account of the operative orders, protected its recognition by INEC.
Lifu subsequently nullified the leadership transition, set aside the decisions and resolutions of the Mark-led NWC and directed INEC not to recognise decisions taken at the 99th NEC meeting.
These outcomes cannot be reconciled merely by saying that the plaintiffs were different.
The question is whether the later judgment has effectively deprived the earlier judgment of its judicial consequences.
If it has, the doctrine of coordinate jurisdiction is directly engaged.
A subsequent judgment does not acquire superiority merely because it was delivered later in time. Nor does a judge of equal jurisdiction acquire appellate powers simply because a subsequent plaintiff presents a different description of his interest.
The authorities in Keni v Efamo and Mkpedem v Udo are relevant to the principle that judicial decisions must be respected and that a court cannot casually reopen matters already judicially settled.
Lifu’s decision to revisit democratic election cannot be examined in isolation from Liman’s treatment of the same transition.
Obono-Obla attempts to present Lifu’s decision as an entirely fresh determination of Section 223(1)(a) of the Constitution and Section 82(3) of the Electoral Act 2022.
But where the same leadership transition, the same NEC proceedings and the same compliance questions had already featured in the earlier adjudication, the later judge was required to confront the legal effect of the earlier judicial determination.
He could not simply proceed as though the previous proceedings had never occurred.
The distinction between notice to INEC and democratic election may be a legitimate legal distinction. But it does not answer whether the factual and legal questions surrounding the 29 July transition had already been judicially determined.
Nor can a subsequent judge manufacture a fresh controversy by isolating one statutory provision from the totality of the earlier judicial proceedings.
If Liman had already determined the relevant compliance questions, Lifu could not reach the opposite conclusion without first confronting the legal effect of that determination.
The proper avenue for challenging an erroneous judgment was an appeal, not a collateral judicial reversal by another judge of coordinate jurisdiction.
CONCLUSION: THE LATER JUDGMENT CANNOT BECOME AN APPEAL OVER THE EARLIER ONE
Obono-Obla has built an elaborate defence around the proposition that Abejide and Bala were different persons, had different capacities and sought different reliefs.
But he has not adequately answered the decisive question: What authority did Justice Lifu possess to make orders that effectively nullified the very leadership transition and consequential decisions that had already been judicially considered in proceedings before Justice Liman?
The answer cannot be that the second plaintiff had a different title in the party.
It cannot be that the second action was differently worded.
And it certainly cannot be that the later judge was entitled to disregard the institutional consequences of a subsisting judgment simply because the earlier decision was delivered in another suit.
The law does not permit litigants to obtain through judicial recycling what they could not obtain through the proper appellate process.
There is, however, one important matter that the Court of Appeal must establish from the certified records: the precise ratio decidendi, material findings and operative orders in Liman’s judgment, and the extent to which Bala’s action was representative of, or otherwise connected to, the earlier litigation. That examination will determine the precise application of the doctrines of issue estoppel, privity and coordinate jurisdiction.
But Obono-Obla’s central proposition, that different plaintiffs and different reliefs automatically extinguish the coordinate-jurisdiction objection, is legally indefensible.
The Federal High Court is one court, not a collection of judicial islands where every judge is free to reverse the institutional consequences of another judge’s subsisting decision.
Justice Lifu was entitled to adjudicate a genuinely distinct controversy. He was not entitled to exercise appellate jurisdiction over Justice Liman’s judgment under the guise of deciding another plaintiff’s case.
That is the fundamental issue Obono-Obla has conspicuously failed to confront.
Alex Ter Adum, PhD
DDG THE NARRATIVE FORCE
