Court Sacks Senator Karimi As APC Candidate For 2027 Kogi West Senatorial Election

The Federal High Court in Abuja on Wednesday nullified the emergence of Senator Sunday Karimi as the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate for the Kogi West Senatorial District in the 2027 general elections.

Delivering judgment in the suit, Justice Salim Ibrahim ordered Karimi to immediately stop parading himself as the party’s flagbearer for the senatorial district ahead of the upcoming polls.

Justice Ibrahim held that the plaintiff, Bamidele Aro, successfully proved his case and was legally entitled to all the judicial reliefs sought in his application.

The court established that the primary election won by Aro was duly conducted by the APC National Working Committee (NWC) Election Committee and monitored by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

Conversely, the judge declared that the parallel primary purportedly won by Karimi was not monitored by the electoral body, rendering it invalid under the law.

Justice Ibrahim noted that INEC possessed no official record of the primary election results claimed by Karimi.

“No wonder, the 3rd defendant (INEC) did not give them the certified true copy of same even after being applied for by the 2nd defendant (Karimi) to the 3rd defendant by a letter dated June 15,” the judge observed, citing Karimi’s Exhibit 7b to support the ruling.

“There is no gainsaying that the purported primary that produced the 2nd defendant was not monitored by the 3rd defendant as required by the Electoral Act and therefore, invalid,” Justice Ibrahim ruled.

He emphasized that Section 84(1)&(12) of the Electoral Act, 2022 makes INEC monitoring mandatory for all political party primaries, establishing that any primary conducted without official oversight is legally null and void.

“The law is settled that for a party primary to be valid, the INEC/2nd Cross/Respondent has to mandatorily observe, and monitor the nomination of the party’s candidate in line with the requirement of Sections 82 (2) (b) and 84 (1) of the Electoral Act, 2022,” the judge noted.

Granting all prayers presented by the plaintiff, Justice Ibrahim stated: “The law is trite that it is the aspirant who emerged at the end of the primaries with highest number of votes that shall be declared the winner of the primaries of the party and the aspirant shall be issued with INEC Form EC9 which shall be forwarded to INEC as the candidate of the party.”

Consequently, the court directed the APC to immediately submit Bamidele Aro’s name as its legitimate candidate for the Kogi West Senatorial contest, while ordering INEC to publish Aro’s name as the official APC flagbearer for the district.

The legal action—which listed the APC, Karimi, and INEC as 1st to 3rd defendants—was originally instituted at the Lokoja division of the Federal High Court before being reassigned to the Abuja division due to security considerations in the state.

In the original suit, Aro requested the court to declare him the rightful winner of the May 18 primary election and to set aside the APC’s subsequent submission of Karimi’s name to INEC.

During defense proceedings, legal counsel John Olusola Baiyeshea (SAN) representing Karimi, Dayo Akinlaja (SAN) representing INEC, and A. G. Ivom representing the APC challenged the court’s jurisdiction, arguing the matter was statute-barred.

Baiyeshea argued that while the primary took place on May 18 and Karimi’s name was submitted on June 29, the plaintiff filed the suit in late July, breaching the 14-day statutory window stipulated under Section 285(9) of the 1999 Constitution for pre-election matters.

Countering the defense, plaintiff’s counsel Johnson Usman (SAN) argued that official certified documents from INEC proved conclusively that Aro won the validly conducted primary, urging the court to uphold the law and order the publication of his client’s name.