CONFLICTING JUDGMENTS, COORDINATE JURISDICTION AND THE SEARCH FOR DOCTRINAL CERTAINTY IN NIGERIAN COURTS

Abstract

In July 2026, two panels of the Court of Appeal sitting in Abuja delivered, within days of one another, contradictory judgments on the validity of the Independent National Electoral Commission’s revised timetable for the 2027 general election: one panel upheld the timetable as a lawful exercise of administrative discretion, while the other struck down the statutory provisions on which part of that timetable rested. This issue was not an isolated lapse but an instance of a recurring institutional problem. The article argues that Nigerian commentary on “conflicting judgments” conflates three analytically distinct phenomena: genuine horizontal conflict between decisions of courts of coordinate jurisdiction; decisions reached per incuriam and subsequently mislabelled as conflicts; and outright non-compliance with the valid orders of a superior court. Each phenomenon has a different institutional cause and therefore requires a different remedy, yet Nigerian reform proposals have tended to address all three with an undifferentiated appeal to judicial care. Drawing on the constitutional text governing enforcement of judicial decisions, leading authorities on precedent, and the 2026 controversies themselves, the article traces the underlying structural problem to the absence of any settled rule of horizontal stare decisis binding coordinate panels, and to the absence of a case-management mechanism capable of flagging a live doctrinal conflict before, rather than after, it produces two final judgments. It closes with a sequenced set of recommendations addressed to the National Judicial Council, the Court of Appeal, and the National Assembly.