Insights on Federal High Court (pre-election) practice directions (amendment), 2026, By Wahab Shittu

The Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions cannot resolve that uncertainty; they can only ensure that whatever constitutional argument is raised is not itself used as an interlocutory delay tactic — which is exactly what Paragraph 11(3)’s restatement of Section 285(8) and Paragraph 12(5)’s costs sanction are built to prevent.

The Federal High Court has issued pre-election-specific Practice Directions before the current framework — most recently the Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions, 2019, which introduced accelerated hearing timelines ahead of the 2019 general elections, and the Federal High Court (Pre-Election) Practice Directions, 2022, issued ahead of the 2023 cycle under the Electoral Act, 2022, which for the first time built the 180-day judgment clock and the two-adjournment discipline into the Federal High Court’s own procedural instrument rather than leaving them to be inferred from the Constitution alone.

If a party’s own nomination process no longer has to conform to the statutory register-and-procedure requirements the Court of Appeal has just voided, a meaningful share of the pre-election litigation the 2026 Practice Directions were designed to accelerate — disputes over whether a primary followed the correct delegate register, or whether direct primary or consensus was properly used — may itself now turn on a live and unsettled constitutional question rather than a straightforward factual dispute about compliance with the Act.