Insights on Federal High Court (pre-election) practice directions (amendment), 2026, By Wahab Shittu

On 13 July 2026, the Honourable Justice John Terhemba Tsoho, KSS, OFR, FCIArb (UK), Chief Judge of the Federal High Court, issued the Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions (Amendment), 2026, effective from Tuesday, 14 July 2026. The instrument amends the Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions, 2026, and was made pursuant to Sections 254, 285(9), (10) and (14) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (as amended), and Sections 29(5) and 88(2) of the Electoral Act, 2026. Its arrival, roughly six months before the general elections scheduled for 16 January 2027, is deliberate rather than incidental: it is the judiciary’s procedural answer to a legislative and constitutional framework that leaves very little room for delay.

Why Pre-Election Litigation Cannot Afford Delay

Nigerian election law treats pre-election disputes — nomination, disqualification, false declarations as to qualification, and complaints touching the conduct of party primaries — as matters that must be resolved before, not after, the ballot. Section 285(9) of the Constitution requires that every pre-election suit be filed within 14 days of the event complained of, while Section 285(10) obligates the court to deliver judgment within 180 days of filing. On appeal, that timeline is stretched further by Section 285(11) and (12). Set against Section 29(1) of the Electoral Act, 2026, which requires political parties to submit their list of nominated candidates not later than 120 days before election day, and Section 88(4), which forbids any court from halting a primary or a general election pending litigation, the arithmetic is unforgiving. A qualification challenge filed close to a primary can easily outlive the electoral calendar itself if the trial court does not move with dispatch. The 2026 Amendment is best read as an attempt to close that gap procedurally, since the legislature has left it structurally open.

What the Amendment Changes

The most immediate innovation is access. Paragraph 6 directs that court registries across all Judicial Divisions be open on Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., exclusively for the filing of pre-election matters. Given the 14-day filing window under Section 285(9), a rule that closed the registry over a weekend could, in practice, extinguish a litigant’s cause of action. Opening the registry converts a constitutional right of access into a practical one.

On commencement, Paragraph 7 retains originating summons as the vehicle for pre-election suits, using Forms 3, 4 and 5 of Appendix 6 to the Federal High Court (Civil Procedure) Rules, 2019, but adds a safeguard for contested facts: where a party alleges fraud, forgery, or other highly contentious facts, the parties must file written depositions in addition to affidavits, and those depositions may be cross-examined. This is a sensible concession to the reality that originating summons procedure, built for undisputed facts, sits awkwardly with allegations of forgery or fraudulent primaries — issues that have often turned pre-election cases into disguised trials. The same Paragraph also requires litigants challenging the conduct or outcome of party primaries to join all necessary parties at the outset, a change discussed in greater depth below.

Service of process is modernised. Paragraph 8 permits electronic mail and other electronic means for the Court to inform counsel of urgent case events, provided at least forty-eight hours’ notice is given, while Paragraph 10 empowers a judge handling a pre-election matter to leverage technology generally, including virtual hearings. Paragraph 9 gives the Chief Judge power to assign judges across Judicial Divisions and to transfer pre-election matters between divisions, which allows caseloads to be balanced against the fixed 180-day clock rather than left to the accident of where a suit happens to be filed.

The provisions on hearings are where the Amendment is most assertive. Paragraph 11 requires the matter to be set down within seven days of the close of pleadings, caps adjournments at two per party save for a change of counsel, bars adjournment applications on a day fixed for hearing, and directs that priority be accorded to pre-election matters until judgment. Paragraph 11(3) restates Section 285(8) of the Constitution: rulings on preliminary objections and other interlocutory issues touching jurisdiction are suspended and delivered only at the stage of final judgment, subject to the proviso that the Court must first satisfy itself that originating processes were properly served. Paragraph 12 extends the same discipline to interlocutory applications generally, fixing five days for a respondent to react and three for a reply, and — notably — authorising costs against a party or counsel found to have brought an interlocutory application merely to delay a pre-election hearing.

Judicial Treatment of the Underlying Provisions: What the Case Law Shows

The Amendment does not write on a blank slate. Each of its major innovations answers a problem the courts have already litigated, repeatedly, under the parent provisions of Section 285. Reading the Practice Directions against that case law sharpens what the drafters were actually responding to.

On the 14-day filing window, the Supreme Court’s position has hardened rather than softened over time. In Garba v Adua(2011) 13 NWLR (Pt. 1263) 1, the Court treated Section 285(9) as plain and self-explanatory, dismissing a pre-election suit as statute-barred once the fourteen days had lapsed from the date of the primary. The Court of Appeal applied the same discipline in Fati Kakenna Alkali Monguno v All Progressives Congress & Ors (2019), holding that a claimant who cannot point to an accrual date within the window bears the consequence of dismissal, whatever the underlying merits. More recently, in Lokpobiri v APC & Ors, the Supreme Court went further and shut down an attempt to import the Interpretation Act’s date-exclusion rule to stretch the fourteen days, confirming that Section 285(9) is a self-contained clock immune to computation workarounds. Paragraph 6’s weekend and public-holiday registry access is, against that background, not administrative generosity — it is the only concession the judiciary can procedurally make to a deadline it has consistently refused to extend by interpretation.

On the originating summons safeguard, the case law exposes a genuine and unresolved tension that Paragraph 7 only partially manages. The settled principle, restated in Ejike Oguebego & Anor v Peoples Democratic Party & Ors per Okoro JSC, is that whether facts are contentious is judged from the nature of the claim and the depositions in the supporting affidavit, not from a party’s own characterisation of the dispute. In Elder Dr Friday Sani v Kogi State House of Assembly & Ors (2019), the Supreme Court, per Onnoghen CJN, went so far as to hold that originating summons is inappropriate wherever proceedings are hostile, irrespective of whether the facts are formally in dispute. Yet the test has been applied unevenly: in PDP v Degi-Eremienyo (2021) 9 NWLR (Pt. 1781) 274, the Supreme Court found that the Court of Appeal had wrongly treated as contentious a set of facts that were, on proper analysis, purely documentary and effectively undisputed. That inconsistency is the real problem Paragraph 7 is trying to manage procedurally rather than doctrinally: instead of forcing a binary choice between originating summons and a full writ action once fraud is alleged, the Amendment grafts deposition evidence and cross-examination onto the summary procedure. It is a workaround for a line-drawing problem the courts themselves have not resolved consistently, and it remains to be tested whether an appellate court will treat the resulting hybrid as satisfying the hostile-facts doctrine or as an impermissible mixing of two distinct procedures.

On Paragraph 11(3)’s restatement of Section 285(8), the doctrinal purpose is narrower but well established: the provision was designed to stop jurisdictional objections from being used as delay vehicles, since an interlocutory ruling on jurisdiction, once appealable in its own right, could stall a substantive hearing for years before the merits were reached. Folding that ruling into the final judgment removes the interlocutory appeal as a tool of obstruction. Paragraph 12(5)’s costs sanction against a party or counsel found to have brought an interlocutory application merely to delay proceedings is best understood as the enforcement mechanism the Constitution’s own text lacks — Section 285(8) suspends the ruling, but says nothing about deterring the application from being filed in the first place.

The Legal Status of a Practice Direction: What It Can and Cannot Do

It is worth pausing on what kind of instrument the 2026 Amendment actually is, because that status limits how far its innovations can go. A Practice Direction issued by a Chief Judge does not carry the force of statute. The Supreme Court settled this in University of Lagos v Aigoro (1985) 1 NWLR (Pt. 1) 143, and reaffirmed it in Nigerian Airports Authority v Okoro (1995) 6 NWLR (Pt. 403) 510 at 523, where Uwais JSC (as he then was) described Practice Directions as statements of the judiciary’s view on practice and procedure that counsel ignore at their peril, but which lack the statutory authority of the Rules of Court themselves. Where a Practice Direction conflicts with the Rules, or with the Constitution, the Rules and the Constitution prevail.

That hierarchy matters for at least two provisions of the 2026 Amendment. First, Paragraph 7’s requirement of written depositions and cross-examination in fraud-tainted originating summons cases is, strictly, an addition to what Order 3 of the Federal High Court (Civil Procedure) Rules, 2019 contemplates for originating summons procedure. It survives scrutiny only because it supplements rather than displaces the Rules — it does not purport to convert the suit into a writ action, and it does not remove the Court’s residual power to order pleadings where it finds the facts genuinely hostile. Second, Paragraph 11(3)’s restatement of Section 285(8) is, by contrast, unimpeachable precisely because it restates rather than innovates: it tracks the constitutional text directly and adds nothing the Constitution did not already require. The lesson for drafters, and for counsel relying on the Amendment, is that its more assertive procedural innovations — the deposition-and-cross-examination hybrid in particular — rest on thinner constitutional ice than the provisions that simply mirror Section 285. A litigant aggrieved by how a trial judge applies Paragraph 7 has a live argument, untested so far, that the Practice Direction has strayed beyond gap-filling into rule-making the Chief Judge’s subsidiary power does not extend to.

Costs as Deterrence: Does Paragraph 12(5) Have Teeth?

Paragraph 12(5)’s costs sanction against interlocutory applications brought merely to delay is not writing on a blank page either. The Supreme Court has already shown, in the pre-election context specifically, that it is willing to use costs as more than a symbolic gesture. In the aftermath of its February 2020 judgment nullifying the All Progressives Congress’s victory in the Bayelsa State governorship election — the same underlying dispute that produced the hostile-facts holding in PDP v Degi-Eremienyo discussed above — a seven-member panel led by Ngwuta JSC dismissed a review application filed on behalf of the APC and its candidates as vexatious, frivolous, and a gross abuse of process, and, in a judgment delivered by Augie JSC, ordered the two Senior Advocates who filed it to personally pay costs of ₦30 million each. The Court returned to that posture in 2023, awarding costs of ₦40 million against counsel for the Peoples Democratic Party over a motion connected to the 2019 Imo State governorship litigation, which the Court again found frivolous.

Those awards were made under the Supreme Court’s general and inherent jurisdiction to sanction abuse of process, not under anything resembling Paragraph 12(5) — the Federal High Court’s power under the Amendment is narrower and confined to interlocutory applications at first instance. But the direction of travel is unmistakable: the apex court has already demonstrated an appetite for costs awards large enough to function as genuine deterrence rather than the nominal, token costs that Nigerian civil procedure commentary has long criticised as toothless. Paragraph 12(5) gives first-instance judges in pre-election matters an explicit textual hook to do the same at the trial stage, before an abusive application has the chance to consume months of the 180-day clock. Whether Federal High Court judges will exercise that power with anything approaching the apex court’s boldness, given that trial judges are ordinarily more cautious about penalising counsel who may appear before them again, is the open question the first cases under the Amendment will answer.

Forum Allocation and the Boundaries of Paragraph 9

Paragraph 9’s grant of power to the Chief Judge to assign and transfer pre-election matters between Judicial Divisions deserves separate scrutiny because it touches a different constitutional interest: the right to fair hearing under Section 36. Transfer powers of this kind are not novel — Section 22(2) of the Federal High Court Act already permits transfer of a matter between the Federal High Court and a State High Court where it is filed in the wrong forum, and Nigerian courts have applied that provision routinely, including in recent high-profile land and infrastructure litigation, without treating transfer itself as offensive to fair hearing. What Paragraph 9 adds is an internal transfer power exercisable purely for docket management, untethered to any finding that the original division was the wrong forum. Used well, it is precisely the kind of caseload balancing the 180-day clock requires. Used carelessly — for example, to move a matter away from a judge midway through hearing evidence, or into a division where a party’s counsel is less able to appear — it risks becoming a fair hearing complaint dressed up as case management. The Amendment does not specify criteria for the Chief Judge’s exercise of this power, which is itself worth flagging: an unstructured discretion of this kind is more litigation-resistant when its exercise is at least minimally reasoned on the record.

A Comparative Note: How Pre-Election Practice Directions Have Evolved

The 2026 Amendment is easier to assess against its own lineage than in isolation. The Federal High Court has issued pre-election-specific Practice Directions before the current framework — most recently the Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions, 2019, which introduced accelerated hearing timelines ahead of the 2019 general elections, and the Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions, 2022, issued ahead of the 2023 cycle under the Electoral Act, 2022, which for the first time built the 180-day judgment clock and the two-adjournment discipline into the Federal High Court’s own procedural instrument rather than leaving them to be inferred from the Constitution alone. Measured against that lineage, the 2026 Amendment is incremental rather than radical: it does not invent the accelerated-hearing model, it hardens it. What is genuinely new is the weekend and public-holiday registry access in Paragraph 6, the deposition-and-cross-examination hybrid in Paragraph 7, and the explicit costs sanction in Paragraph 12(5). Each of the three responds to a specific failure mode observed in 2019 and 2023 pre-election litigation — missed filing deadlines caused by registry closure, originating summons proceedings collapsing into disguised trials over disputed primaries, and interlocutory applications timed to run down the clock. Read this way, the Amendment is less a fresh policy statement than a running repair of specific defects the courts and practitioners identified in the two preceding election cycles, which is also why its case-law anchors above are drawn overwhelmingly from litigation arising out of the 2019 and 2023 elections rather than from any new doctrine.

Joinder of Necessary Parties: The Case Law Behind an Underappreciated Change

One feature of the 2026 Amendment has attracted less commentary than the registry-access and deposition provisions, but is doctrinally significant: litigants challenging the conduct or outcome of party primaries are now required to join all necessary parties before the Court can effectively determine the dispute. That requirement did not appear from nowhere; it answers a recurring defect in pre-election litigation that the Supreme Court has punished repeatedly.

The governing test is still the one laid down in Green v Green (1987) 3 NWLR (Pt. 61) 480: a necessary party is one interested in the subject matter of the proceedings and without whom the proceedings cannot be fairly determined. The consequence of getting that wrong in the pre-election context is illustrated starkly in Azubuike v PDP & Ors (2014) LPELR-22258(SC), where the Supreme Court held that a necessary party should be allowed to have his fate determined on his own terms rather than being shut out of proceedings that bind him, and that a judgment against a person who was never joined cannot stand. Both cases arose outside the pre-election-specific procedural framework, which is precisely the point: the joinder problem is not unique to elections, but its consequences are magnified there because a defective joinder discovered on appeal, after the 180-day trial clock and the 60-day appeal clock have already run, may leave no time to cure the defect before the election itself has taken place.

Requiring joinder of all necessary parties at the point of filing, rather than leaving it to be raised as a preliminary objection later, is therefore not a minor housekeeping addition. It forecloses a specific and previously exploitable delay tactic: a respondent who spots a joinder defect has historically had every incentive to sit on that objection until Section 285(8) forces it to be raised and then folded into a final judgment that may itself already be running close to the 180-day boundary, at which point a successful objection effectively kills the suit on a technicality rather than the merits. Building the joinder requirement into the originating process itself shifts that risk back onto the claimant’s own drafting at the outset, where it is more easily fixed, rather than leaving it as a trap sprung by the respondent near the finish line.

Section 88(4) in Practice: A Constitutional Fight Already Under Way

The tension between Section 88(4)’s bar on court-ordered suspension of primaries or elections and the compressed pre-election timetable, flagged earlier in this paper as a structural gap the Amendment cannot close, is not a theoretical concern. It is currently being litigated in real time, in a related but distinct part of the same Electoral Act, 2026. In July 2026, a three-member panel of the Court of Appeal, Abuja Division, led by Balkisu Aliyu JCA, struck down Sections 77(5), (6) and (7) and Section 84(2) of the Electoral Act, 2026 — the provisions governing membership registers for party primaries and the mandated procedure for candidate nomination — in an appeal brought by the Zenith Party against the Independent National Electoral Commission, marked CA/ABJ/CV/750/2026. The Court held that Sections 77(6) and 84(2), which required registers submitted to INEC and mandated direct primaries or consensus as the only lawful nomination methods, were inconsistent with Sections 221 and 222 of the Constitution, which vest political parties with the right to determine their own nomination processes free of external dictation, including from INEC or the National Assembly.

The relevance of that decision to this Amendment is direct. If a party’s own nomination process no longer has to conform to the statutory register-and-procedure requirements the Court of Appeal has just voided, a meaningful share of the pre-election litigation the 2026 Practice Directions were designed to accelerate — disputes over whether a primary followed the correct delegate register, or whether direct primary or consensus was properly used — may itself now turn on a live and unsettled constitutional question rather than a straightforward factual dispute about compliance with the Act. A trial judge applying Paragraph 7’s fraud-and-forgery safeguard, or assessing whether facts are genuinely hostile under the Degi-Eremienyo line of authority, may now also have to grapple with whether the very statutory yardstick the claimant is measuring the primary against remains good law pending any further appeal. The Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions cannot resolve that uncertainty; they can only ensure that whatever constitutional argument is raised is not itself used as an interlocutory delay tactic — which is exactly what Paragraph 11(3)’s restatement of Section 285(8) and Paragraph 12(5)’s costs sanction are built to prevent. Practitioners should treat the Zenith Party decision as live law to be monitored rather than settled background, given that a further appeal to the Supreme Court on a matter of this constitutional significance is a live possibility before the 2027 cycle is over.

Recommendations for Practitioners Ahead of the 2027 Cycle

Pulling the case law together into practical guidance, five habits should now be standard in any Federal High Court pre-election file opened under the 2026 Amendment. First, calendar the fourteen days from the date of the event itself and file within it regardless of intervening weekends or holidays — Garba v Adua, Monguno v APC, and Lokpobiri v APC leave no interpretive room to argue otherwise, and Paragraph 6’s weekend registry access exists precisely so that excuse is no longer available. Second, plead the joinder of every necessary party — every declared winner, every affected officeholder — at the point of filing rather than waiting to see if the opposing side raises it, since Azubuike v PDP shows how fatal a late-discovered joinder defect can be once the 180-day clock is running. Third, where fraud or forgery is alleged, prepare depositions capable of withstanding cross-examination from the outset, and be ready to argue the Degi-Eremienyo and Oguebego v PDP hostile-facts test on its own terms, because Paragraph 7’s hybrid procedure does not relieve counsel of showing why the facts genuinely are, or are not, hostile. Fourth, treat every interlocutory application with the assumption that opposing counsel — and the Court — will scrutinise its timing against Paragraph 12(5) and the Supreme Court’s demonstrated willingness to impose costs heavy enough to sting; an application filed to test a point of law is very different, in the Court’s eyes, from one filed to consume the calendar. Fifth, where a primary-conduct challenge turns on the statutory register-and-procedure requirements of Sections 77 or 84 of the Electoral Act, factor in that those very provisions are, as of July 2026, under live constitutional challenge following the Court of Appeal’s decision in the Zenith Party litigation, and build an alternative constitutional or common-law footing for the claim rather than resting it solely on statutory language that may not survive further appellate scrutiny.

None of this displaces the need for case-specific judgment. But it reflects a consistent theme across the authorities surveyed in this paper: Nigerian courts have shown far less patience for procedural gamesmanship in pre-election litigation than in ordinary civil suits, and the 2026 Amendment is best read as codifying that impatience into the Federal High Court’s own rulebook rather than introducing a new judicial temperament.

Reading the Amendment Against the Wider Framework

None of this operates in a vacuum. Commentary on the Electoral Act, 2026 has already flagged a structural tension: Section 88(4)’s bar on court-ordered suspension of elections, read together with the cumulative constitutional timeline for first-instance judgment and appeals, can in principle run well beyond the compressed 120-day nomination-to-election window. Where that happens, a candidate whose qualification is genuinely in doubt may complete the electoral process before the courts pronounce on the challenge. The Practice Directions do not, and could not, resolve that legislative gap — a Chief Judge’s rule-making power under Sections 254 and 285(9), (10) and (14) of the Constitution is procedural, not a substitute for primary legislation. What the Amendment can do, and appears designed to do, is strip out every avoidable procedural delay on the judiciary’s side of the ledger: registry access, adjournments, service, interlocutory skirmishing, and forum allocation across divisions. Whether that is enough to meaningfully compress outcomes within the Electoral Act’s tight nomination timetable remains, honestly, a matter courts will only settle once the first cases under the Amendment are tested — particularly the interaction between the two-adjournment cap and the deposition-and-cross-examination requirement in fraud-tainted cases, which could itself consume hearing time the caps were designed to save. The case law on hostile facts surveyed above suggests that interaction will not resolve itself quietly; Degi-Eremienyo shows that even the Supreme Court has split with the Court of Appeal over where the hostile-facts line sits, and Paragraph 7 has now placed a procedural hybrid directly on top of that unsettled boundary.

For practitioners, the practical takeaways are clear. Pleadings in pre-election matters should now anticipate weekend and public-holiday filing where the 14-day window under Section 285(9) demands it, bearing in mind that Garba v Adua, Monguno v APC, and Lokpobiri v APC leave no room for an extension argument once the window closes. Where fraud, forgery, or the propriety of a primary is in issue, written depositions should be prepared alongside the supporting affidavit from the outset, and counsel should be ready to argue — by reference to Degi-Eremienyo and Oguebego v PDP — why the facts as pleaded are, or are not, genuinely hostile, since that characterisation will still matter even under the hybrid procedure. Counsel should also expect courts to hold firmly to the two-adjournment ceiling and to treat interlocutory applications with suspicion where they appear timed to erode the 180-day clock — the costs sanction in Paragraph 12(5) gives that suspicion teeth, and Section 285(8) jurisprudence confirms the underlying policy is not new.

Conclusion

The Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions (Amendment), 2026 is, at its core, a housekeeping instrument with high stakes attached to it. It does not alter substantive electoral law, and it cannot cure the timing mismatch built into the Electoral Act, 2026 and Section 285 of the Constitution. What it does is remove excuses: for late filing, for registry inaccessibility, for adjournment gamesmanship, and for interlocutory delay. Read against the weight of existing Supreme Court and Court of Appeal authority on Sections 285(8) and (9) and on the limits of originating summons, the Amendment looks less like a fresh policy departure and more like an attempt to build procedural scaffolding around doctrine the courts had already settled but which practice, absent that scaffolding, continued to circumvent. As the 2027 general elections approach, that discipline — modest as it may sound in a practice direction — is likely to matter as much as any statutory amendment in determining whether pre-election disputes are actually resolved before, rather than after, the votes are cast.

Wahab Shittu is a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN)