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From Uchenna Inya, Abakaliki
The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Ebonyi State, has described the Saturday local government and councilorship elections in the state as illegality and mono-party exercise.
Ebonyi State Independent Electoral Commission (EBSIEC), declared candidates of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as winners of the elections.
PDP in a statement signed by its Publicity Secretary, Darlington Onwe said a local government structure produced by a mono-party exercise cannot, by any honest reading of the July 2024 judgment, qualify as democratically elected, and that any council so produced in the state can’t stand.
He alleged that the elections were conducted in disobedience to court judgements.
” The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Ebonyi State Chapter, has convened this press conference to place on record, in clear legal and constitutional terms, our position that what EBSIEC and the Ebonyi State Government are presenting to the public as a local government election purportedly scheduled for today the 22nd August 2026 is not, in law or in fact, an election at all.
“It is a brazen assault on our democracy, a flagrant act of contempt, a continuing abuse of subsisting court process, and an exercise being conducted on a foundation the courts have already, and repeatedly, declared to be nothing.
“Hence, it’s worth a mention that what is built on nothing cannot stand; it is bound to fail. That is not a political opinion. It is a settled principle of Nigerian law, and it governs everything we say today in defence of the constitutional rights of the Ebonyi people.
“By Section 7(1) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended), the system of local government by democratically elected local government councils is guaranteed, and government at every level is obliged to ensure their existence under a law that provides for their establishment, structure, composition, finance and functions.
” Section 14(2)(a) and (c) further provide that sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria, from whom government derives its powers and authority, and that participation by the people in their government is a fundamental objective of the state. It must be stated plainly: the local government system is a creation of, and is guaranteed by, the Federal Constitution, not a discretionary appendage of state government.
“While Section 7 assigns to State Houses of Assembly the administrative duty of legislating for the structure of local government within their states, that duty is exercised strictly under and subject to the Constitution; a State House of Assembly, therefore, cannot validly, by ordinary state law, narrow, dilute, or contradict the essential democratic and tenurial guarantees the Constitution itself protects.
“Read together, these provisions mean that a local government poll contested, in substance, by only one political party, with rival parties intentionally excluded, unrecognised, or never genuinely allowed to field candidates, is an insult to democracy and not the election these sections contemplate. It is self-succession dressed as an election, and it is incapable in law of conferring legitimacy on whoever emerges from it.
“This is reinforced at the highest level by the Supreme Court’s decision in Attorney-General of the Federation v. Attorney-General of Abia State & 35 Others (Suit No. SC/CV/343/2024; reported at (2024) 17 NWLR (Pt. 1966) 1, lead judgment delivered by Agim, JSC on 11 July 2024), in which the apex court held that only democratically elected local government councils are constitutionally entitled to recognition and to the direct receipt of federal allocation, and that state governments cannot lawfully substitute unelected or improperly constituted arrangements for such councils.
“Within that same judgment, per the Certified True Copy attributed to Hon. Justice Mohammed Lawal Garba, JSC, sitting as part of the seven-Justice panel, the Court further pronounced that local government chairmen and councillors are entitled to a uniform four-year tenure of office, aligning local government administration with the tenure enjoyed by every other elected officer at state and federal level.
“This makes the illegality confronting Ebonyi State a double one. A local government structure produced by a mono-party exercise cannot, by any honest reading of the July 2024 judgment, qualify as democratically elected, and any council so produced in Ebonyi State would stand exposed to the same consequence the Supreme Court contemplated for caretaker and non-elected arrangements: disqualification from lawful federal allocation, at a time when the thirteen local government areas of this State can least afford it.
“Compounding this is a defect that goes to the very root of the office EBSIEC purports to be filling tomorrow. The Amended Ebonyi State Local Government Law No. 005 — the very instrument under which this election is being conducted fixes the tenure of local government chairmen and councillors in Ebonyi State at two years, a position publicly reiterated by the state government itself as recently as its 2022 inauguration of council officials. This is not a minor administrative variance; it is a direct violation of federal constitutional supremacy.
“It falls short of the three-year tenure that had, for years, been the constitutional norm applied across the federation under the Electoral Act, and it falls further still below the four-year uniform tenure the Supreme Court has now definitively pronounced upon in the July 2024 judgment.
“By Section 1(3) of the Constitution, “if any other law is inconsistent with the provisions of this Constitution, this Constitution shall prevail, and that other law shall, to the extent of the inconsistency, be void.” Hence, the Ebonyi State’s two-year tenure provision is precisely such an inconsistent law. It is void, and any election conducted to fill offices whose very tenure is unconstitutionally truncated cannot cure that defect merely by being conducted; a void foundation produces nothing but a void structure standing upon it.
“It is a matter of public judicial record that this is not the first time Ebonyi State’s local government elections have collapsed under legal scrutiny. On 25 August 2022, the Federal High Court, Abakaliki, presided over by the late Justice Fatun Riman, in Suit No. FHC/AI/CS/151, nullified the local government election conducted on 30 July 2022, holding it unconstitutional, null, void and of no effect for non-compliance with the Electoral Act 2022 and the denial of a level playing field to contestants.
“Rather than obey that judgment, the Ebonyi State Government proceeded, in open defiance, to swear in thirteen persons as local government chairmen on the strength of the very election the Federal High Court had declared to be nothing. The State Government thereafter appealed the Riman judgment to the Court of Appeal, Enugu Division, and lost: in May 2025, the Court of Appeal affirmed the Federal High Court’s nullification in full.
“Undeterred, and while that litigation was still alive, EBSIEC proceeded to conduct a fresh local government and councillorship election on 20 July 2024, again returning candidates of the ruling party unopposed in the outcome, across all thirteen chairmanship seats and one hundred and seventy-one councillorship seats. That election, too, was challenged in court, and on 21 October 2025, the Federal High Court, Abakaliki, presided over by Justice H.I.O. Oshomah, nullified it in its entirety, sacking all thirteen chairmen and all one hundred and seventy-one councillors for non-compliance with the Electoral Act 2022 and the 1999 Constitution, and expressly restraining EBSIEC and the Ebonyi State Government from conducting any further local government election except strictly in accordance with the Constitution and the Electoral Act.
” To the best of our party’s information, that order has not been set aside, stayed, or overturned on appeal, and it therefore subsists today, binding on EBSIEC and the State Government alike by virtue of Section 287(3) of the 1999 Constitution, which makes the decisions of the Federal High Court enforceable throughout Nigeria by all authorities and persons.
What EBSIEC now purportedly proposes for today being the 22 August 2026 is, on this record, nothing less than a third attempt to defeat an order of a court of competent jurisdiction that has never been vacated and a third attempt conducted in the teeth of an express judicial restraint naming EBSIEC itself. There is no gentler word for that than contempt and a deliberate sabotage of the rule of law.
“It is against this background: the two elections nullified in succession, one nullification affirmed on appeal, a subsisting injunction still standing against EBSIEC and the State Government by name, and now a tenure provision that is itself unconstitutional on its face, that we categorically submit that the local government structure in Ebonyi State currently rests on no lawful foundation whatsoever, and that the mono-party election EBSIEC now proposes to hold today on 22 August 2026, without first purging these defects and without genuine, verifiable multi-party participation, would be void ab initio.
“This is not a novel proposition. It reflects the settled common law principle, long applied by Nigerian courts, that you cannot put something on nothing and expect it to stay there: it will collapse, as Lord Denning held in Macfoy v. United Africa Co. Ltd, a statement of law Nigerian courts, including our own Supreme Court, have repeatedly adopted as correctly stating our law on void acts and their consequences. An act founded on a nullity is itself a nullity, no matter how procedurally correct it may appear on its face, and no matter how many persons are sworn into office as a result of it.
“We cannot separate this legal reality from its financial consequence for a State already reeling under the weight of poor governance. As a responsible opposition political party standing in defence of democracy, we recall that, following the 2022 defiance, a Federal High Court had cause to restrain the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), and the Federal Ministry of Finance from releasing allocations to Ebonyi’s thirteen local government councils until the State complied with the subsisting judgment. Given the binding force of the July 2024 Supreme Court judgment, which conditions direct federal allocation on democratic legitimacy, we formally place the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), the Federation Account Allocation Committee (FAAC), and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on notice that any council structure emerging from tomorrow’s exercise is not, and cannot become, a lawful recipient of Federation Account allocation, and any disbursement made to such a structure would itself be an act taken in disregard of binding Supreme Court authority.
“A repeat of the 2022 scenario, entirely foreseeable given the present posture of EBSIEC and the State Government, would once again starve grassroots administration of federal allocation at a time when, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, Ebonyi records the highest poverty ratio in Southern Nigeria, at an estimated 80 per cent of its population trapped below the poverty-line”, Onwe said.
