A suit filed at the federal high court in Abuja is asking a judge to declare Goodluck Jonathan ineligible to contest for president again, reopening a legal fight over whether he can seek the office in 2027. The case, marked FHC/ABJ/CS/2102/2025, was filed by Johnmary Jideobi.
Jideobi says Jonathan has already taken the presidential oath twice, first in 2010 after the death of Umaru Musa Yar'Adua and again in 2011 after winning the presidential election. The argument goes to the heart of goodluck jonathan presidential eligibility and asks the court to stop a repeat run before it starts.
Jonathan's path to the presidency began in 2007, when he was vice-president, and changed in May 2010 when he became president after Yar'Adua died and completed the late president's tenure. He later won the 2011 presidential election and failed in his bid for a second term in 2015. Those two oaths now sit at the center of the fresh court battle.
This is not the first time the question has been tested in court. In a separate suit, FCT/HC/CV/2449/2012, Cyriacus Njoku tried to stop Jonathan from contesting another election after the 2011 victory, arguing that the first oath on May 6, 2010 should count as a presidential term and that Jonathan had already exhausted the constitutional limit because of the second oath in 2011. Njoku also asked the court to restrain Jonathan, the Peoples Democratic Party and the Independent National Electoral Commission from presenting or accepting his candidature for the 2015 election.
Jonathan's response was that he had only been elected president once, in 2011, and that his move into office in 2010 was a constitutional succession, not the kind of election covered by section 137(b) of the constitution. On March 1, 2013, Mudashiru Oniyangi agreed, saying the plaintiff lacked the locus standi to bring the case and holding that the section could not apply because Jonathan had won only one election. Oniyangi also said Jonathan was neither a presidential aspirant in the 2007 election nor sworn in as president in 2007, and that the 2010 oath was a succession after Yar'Adua's death, not an election.
Njoku took that ruling to the court of appeal, where a five-member panel affirmed the decision on March 3, 2015. That history is why the 2025 filing matters now: the legal issue was not settled by politics, only by a chain of court rulings, and the new suit is trying to overturn the practical answer those cases left behind. For Jonathan, the new case presses the same old fault line — whether 2010 counts as a first presidential term or only as succession — and the court will have to decide that again.
The answer, for now, is that Jonathan's eligibility remains contested in court, but the earlier rulings favored the view that he became president by succession in 2010 and was elected only once, in 2011.
