News
Wike triumphs again! Damagun remains PDP Chairman till 2025 – court
Justice Peter Lifu of the Federal High Court in Abuja on Friday, barred the National Executive Committee (NEC) and Board of Trustees (BoT) of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from removing Umar Damagum as the Acting National Chairman of the party, stating that no person other than Damagum should be recognised as PDP national chairman until the party’s national convention scheduled for December 2025.
Lifu, who made the order after listening to the arguments of Umar El-Gash Maina, a former member of the Senate from Yobe State, held that in line with Articles 42, 47, and 67 of PDP, it was only at the national convention of the party that national officers could be elected.
The ruling, which is coming against the background of the reported suspension of Damagun alongside Samuel Anyanwu, the National Secretary, by a group in the PDP National Working Committee (NWC), has opened a fresh chapter in the crisis engulfing the former ruling party, since after its National Convention in 2022.
The emergence of Atiku Abubakar, former Vice President as the presidential candidate for the 2023 election in the convention, had split the party down the middle, as Nyesom Wike, then Governor of Rivers State, who came second, had insisted that Iyorchia Ayu, must step down as the National Chairman, owing to the fact that he also came from the North like Atiku.
He had gone ahead to team up with four other dissenting governors, including Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi of Enugu, Samuel Ortom of Benue, Seyi Makinde of Oyo and Okezie Ikpeazu to form the group of five, otherwise known as the G5 to fight the former VP which is believed to have led to his defeat at the February 25, 2023 presidential polls.
Damagun, believed to enjoy the support of Wike and his group, eventually took over from Ayu, after he was shown out of office following constitutional issues that was raised about his election, and has occupied the position ever since, though on acting capacity, a situation, now being challenged by some dissatisfied party members.
Lifu, who had held that PDP members were bound by the party’s constitution and must always act in line with it, took the decision after the Senator, who claimed to be chairman of PDP in Yobe State instituted the suit against PDP and eight others alleging that some of the party’s stakeholders had been holding clandestine meetings to forcefully remove Damagum from office in gross violation of the party’s constitution.
Maina, who said that a former Deputy Governor of Kogi State, Phillip Salawu, was being pushed forward as Damagun’s replacement, also regretted that the two letters of complaint he wrote to Anyanwu, about the clandestine meetings, were never acted upon.
Joshua Musa, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), lawyer to Maina, had told the court to invoke articles 45, 47, and 67 of the PDP constitution to stop the move to replace Damagum as the Acting National Chairman and to declare that the national chairmanship of the PDP is rotated between the north and south regions and not through any other procedure not enshrined in the PDP’s Constitution.
Lifu, who agreed with the argument that Damagum could only be replaced at the national convention held that any attempt to truncate the four-year tenure of the northern region, which had not been completed, without the national convention will amount to an affront to the PDP constitution.
He dismissed the counter argument that Maina had no locus standi to bring the case and that the court lacked jurisdiction to hear it, stating that the Yobe PDP boss predicated his suit on the protection of the party’s Constitution from being violated and the northern region where he came from being short-changed.
He insisted that Maina, having displayed his PDP membership card before the court and having raised the fundamental issue of protection of PDP’s Constitution, had sufficient interest and justiciable cause to institute the case.
While declaring that PDP NEC and BoT are bound by the party’s Constitution and that Damagum as national chairman can only be replaced through the national convention of the party, he also held that Damagum having been appointed from the northern region where a former national chairman Iyorcha Ayu hailed from is entitled to serve out the remaining tenure of the national chairman.
Justice Muhammad Nuraddeen Bello of High Court sitting in Sokoto State has sentenced three men, including a foreign national, to death by hanging, after convicting them on charges bordering on terrorism and arms proliferation.
The convicts, Yusuf Muhammad (alias Sallau), a Nigerien; Jabbi Alhaji Yalle; and Kabiru Muhammad, were apprehended on 13th June, 2025, by the Department of State Services (DSS) Counter Terrorism Unit in connection with cross-border criminal activities bordering on arms trafficking and terrorism.
Bello, who found all three defendants guilty as charged and sentenced them to death by hanging, while also ordering the forfeiture of all monetary exhibits recovered from the convicts to the Federal Government, said: “The conviction is the latest in a series of successful prosecutions by the DSS in its sustained operations against terrorism and organised cross-border criminal networks across Nigeria.”
The sentencing is coming about two weeks after the Federal High Court sitting in Abuja sentenced each of the five suspects arrested on May 31, 2026, by the DSS for their involvement in the November 21, 2025, attack on St Mary’s Catholic School, Papiri, Niger State, to 25 years’ imprisonment.
Justice Binta Nyako, had handed down the judgment after the men, including two Nigeriens, pleaded guilty to all four terrorism-related charges, bordering on support for the commission of an act of terrorism, breaching both Section 16 of the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022, and the Firearms Act, were pressed against them.
According to Count One, the men were accused of jointly conspiring to assist a terrorist by agreeing and intentionally playing various roles towards conveying 15 AK 103 rifles as well as about 1,434 rounds of 7.62mm live ammunition from the Diffa region, Republic of Niger, to one Malam Ahmad, a member of the Boko Haram terrorist group based in Borgu, Niger State, and thereby committed an offence contrary to Section 26(1) of the Terrorism (Prevention and Prohibition) Act, 2022.
Primate Elijah Ayodele, is on the verge of coughing out a whopping N10billion, if he fails to offer unrestrained apology to Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, former Governor of Kano State within the next 24 hours, and retract his claim that the former Minister of Defence is bidding his time to betray Peter Obi, to whom he is to contest the 2027 presidential election as a running mate.
Without doing so, the controversial cleric, should be ready for a major court battle with the vice-presidential candidate of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC), the platform on which the pair is to contest the election.
In a letter indicating a legal action against Ayodele of the INRI Evangelical Spiritual Church over defamatory remarks, Kwankwaso, through Magaji Mato Ibrahim, SAN & Co., his lawyers demanded an immediate retraction and apology from the cleric over the allegations.
Details of the letter, dated June 11, and unveiled through the X platform of the legal team, was based on a viral video recorded during a live-streamed church service, where the preacher made allegations targeting Kwankwaso’s integrity as Peter Obi’s running mate under the NDC.
Quoting the cleric as stating: “KWANKWASO IS A FAKE TO OBI, KWANKWASO WILL BETRAY YOU. KWANKWASO HAS BEEN PAID TO BE VICE PRESIDENT TO OBI AMONG OTHER LIBELOUS COMMENTS WHILE PRETENDING TO BE A PREACHER,” the former governor said the comments were unprovoked, grossly unfounded, and carefully designed to create a rift within the ranks of the political party and its supporters.
Handing Ayodele a 24-hour ultimatum to publish a full and unequivocal retraction across all social media platforms and news outlets with the same prominence as the original video, they also demanded a written undertaking that he would cease and desist from making any further malicious statements against their client, warning that failure to comply, would lead to full legal actions.
The letter stated: “We shall claim substantial damages to the tune of Ten Billion Naira and cost of the action on a full indemnity basis amongst other reliefs.”
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Tuesday demanded the immediate end to the exportation of minerals from countries in Africa in their raw forms, which he said had led to massive exploitation of the continent.
The President, told member countries of the African Minerals Strategy Group (AMSG), a forum of Ministers in charge of Mining and Solid Minerals on the continent to speak with one voice to promote, collective interests, ensure value addition, and prevent the continent from becoming merely a source of raw materials for the rest of the world.
As the Grand Patron of the group, chaired by Dele Alake, Nigeria’s Minister of Solid Minerals Development, gave the charge while receiving a delegation of AMSG in the State House, Tinubu told the delegation that the group had a critical role to play in strengthening Africa’s bargaining power in the global mineral market and ensuring that the continent derives maximum value from its natural resources.
His words: “ What we should do is avoid bureaucracy and deceit; we must put an end to exploitation. The rest of the world won’t mind if your country is a cesspit of dams and rubbish and excavates your raw materials without giving value.
“It is our responsibility to collaborate and cooperate to ensure that these metals and minerals bring value to us, bring technology to us, and we can do it. It is how much each country will put into the research, development and refinery. I don’t see reasons we cannot demand centralisation of that conversation somewhere on the continent. So why not utilise that in our research and development and knowledge-based economy to enhance the quality of life and bring prosperity to our people.”
Emphasising that Africa possessed enormous mineral wealth that should be strategically harnessed to drive industrialisation, create jobs and accelerate economic transformation across the continent, the President, said the era of exporting raw minerals without local processing and beneficiation must give way to a new model that encourages investment in local industries, technology transfer and the development of value chains that retain wealth within Africa.
Alake, who had earlier expressed gratitude to the President for his exemplary leadership under the Renewed Hope Agenda, said the gesture had shown support for Nigeria’s mineral sector, especially in the local value-addition and economic diversification drive, where artisanal miners are empowered.
He told the President: “You encouraged us to look at the focal point of the establishment of this group, which is to ensure that the African natural resources, especially with regards to minerals, critical matters, are localised, the beneficiation coming directly to Africans generally.
“You charged us that we should set our sails very high and ensure that local value addition is a pivot around which all the objectives of this organisation should revolve.
“So, sir, we have gone implemented your charge and we are quitted that today local value addition is reverberating all over Africa.”
He added that some member countries have gone ahead to ban the export of raw minerals.
He explained members of the body were in Abuja for the Fifth edition of the African Natural Resources and Energy Investment Summit (AFNIS 2026), to push for a new continental approach to resource management and industrial development.
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