The Federal High Court, Abuja, has upheld the exclusion of Labour Party (LP) candidates from the area council elections scheduled to take place on 21 February in the Federal Capital Territory (FCT).
Delivering judgment on Wednesday, the judge, Peter Lifu, declined to order the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to accept or publish the party’s list of candidates for the polls.
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Mr Lifu said that the suit filed by the Labour Party and its candidates for the FCT elections, was statute barred having not been filed 14 days after the cause of action arose.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the party and its candidates for the FCT council polls had filed the suit challenging INEC’s decision to exclude LP candidates from the elections.
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The party had argued that its candidates were duly nominated but were unlawfully excluded when INEC published the final list of contestants in September 2025.
The party also complained that its logo was omitted from the list of political parties authorised to participate in the elections.
The plaintiffs said they wrote to the INEC chairman on 8 September 2025, and followed up with a letter on 2 October 2025, protesting the exclusion, but received no response.
They told the court that without judicial intervention, they would be unfairly barred from fielding candidates in the polls.
Mr Lifu, however, dismissed the suit, upholding INEC’s position on the exclusion of the party’s candidates.
The judgement came barely 24 hours after another judge of the Federal High Court in Abuja, Mohammed Umar, ordered INEC to publish the names of the candidates forwarded to it by the chairperson of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), David Mark.
But the circumstances of the cases are different.
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In the ADC’s case, the court ruled that INEC acted unlawfully by refusing to grant access to the new leadership of the party for the upload of party’s candidates’ details to the electronic platform.
“The reliance on a change of leadership amounts to a failure and a fruitless excuse,” the judge said, rejecting INEC’s justification for its action, adding that the commission denied the applicants “the opportunity to complete the process of participation” in the election.
The judge also noted that the change in leadership had been duly communicated and updated on the relevant website, which, according to to him, constituted sufficient notice to INEC.
(NAN)
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