The Peoples Democratic Party on Monday appointed Kabiru Turaki to lead a 13-member interim National Working Committee after a day of meetings in Abuja that laid bare how deeply divided the party remains. The move came at the party’s 103rd National Executive Committee meeting, where Aziegbemi Anthony moved the motion for the interim committee.
The appointment followed a fresh round of fighting over who controls the opposition party after the Supreme Court overturned the legal footing of the convention that elected Turaki as national chairman. At the center of the dispute is whether the PDP obeyed court orders that blocked the convention held on November 15 and 16, 2025, in Ibadan.
That convention was struck down in a split judgment delivered on April 30 in appeal SC/CV/164/2026. Three of the five justices agreed with Justice Stephen Adah’s majority decision that the Turaki-led faction went ahead in “flagrant disregard” of a subsisting order of the Federal High Court. Adah said Peter Lifu had issued a temporary order on November 11 restraining the party from proceeding and then a final order on November 14 stopping it from conducting the convention. He also said the appellants violated that order and that the party abused court process by filing a similar case before another court of coordinate jurisdiction.
The legal fight has now split the party into camps that both claim legitimacy. Adolphus Wabara said on Thursday that the PDP Board of Trustees had assumed leadership of the party after the ruling, and the BoT then appointed the 13-member interim National Working Committee. On the other side, the Tanimu Turaki bloc held its own NEC meeting on Monday at the Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja and maintained that the Abuja convention which produced the Abdulrahman Mohammed-led National Working Committee is null and void.
That is the friction the PDP is still trying to live through: one side says the Ibadan convention never had legal force, while the other says the Abuja convention that re-elected Abdulrahman Mohammed and other members of the National Working Committee in March 2026 remains valid. Nyesom Wike said the Supreme Court judgment had settled the matter once and for all, adding that there is only one PDP and that faction does not exist any longer in the party. He also reaffirmed that the Abdulrahman-led convention remains valid.
The latest move may calm one layer of the dispute, but it does not erase the fact that the party now has competing claims to authority, competing meetings in Abuja, and competing readings of the same court history. For now, the immediate answer is plain enough: the PDP has named Turaki to lead an interim committee, but the party’s deeper battle over who truly speaks for it has not ended.
