When ADC politicians of the David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola faction held their so-called summit in the name of Nigerian opposition parties in Ibadan last week, one prayer that must have filled their hearts is that their legal battle at the Supreme Court with the Nafiu Bala Gombe’s faction of their party should turn out in their favour. Any other outcome would be disastrous as they would have attempted to build something on nothing, to quote an expression made famous by Nigerian legal commentators.
Yet, its hostile takeover of a near-comatose party that had been in existence for about two decades, shoving aside some of its leaders and moving straight to constitute its leadership, may be the real definition of building something on nothing. Against the party’s constitutional requirement that an aspiring executive committee member should have been a member of the party for at least two years, David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola assumed the leadership of ADC and went on to organise a convention in total disregard of an existing court order that had advised against any escalatory action.
My description of the Ibadan crowd as a gathering of a faction of the ADC is to give the lie to the attempt by a part that seeks to make itself the whole. It is as deliberate as the action of the ADC leaders who chose to describe their own faction of their party as the entire body of Nigerian opposition parties in order to sustain the narrative they have been pushing that Nigeria is headed towards a one-party state. I make this distinction between the faction of the ADC that is pretending it is the Nigerian opposition or the face of it not because I support any covert or overt move to destabilise opposition parties, as has been alleged by some Nigerians against the APC. I make the distinction simply to interrogate the ADC’s claim that it is or it represents Nigerian opposition parties in a country where there are at least 20 other political parties aside the ones that attended the summit in Ibadan.
I should also make clear that while I do not support APC’s alleged destabilisation antics, I also don’t agree that it has an obligation to help organise the opposition as some Nigerians have dared to suggest. Unbeknownst to them, which is the irony of their claim, such a move would only go to prove that Nigeria is actually a one-party state or is headed towards becoming one. If one party can or is saddled with the task of organising others, then we have no business pretending that other parties exist. If they do exist, then it is only at the behest of the party that organised them, just as the military helped to create the NRC and the SDP in the 1990s and directed their affairs in the manner that led to the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election and eventually the annihilation of both the NRC and the SDP. The SDP that exists today is certainly not the SDP that produced MKO Abiola as the winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. That’s for those who might be confused by the similarity in name and ideology.
Talking about today’s SDP, somehow it escaped the fate that has befallen the ADC when it resisted the attempt by Nasir el-Rufai to hijack its leadership. Its presidential candidate in the 2023 presidential election, Prince Adebayo Adewole, is one of the most gifted and articulate politicians presently around. I am not sure Adewole was in Ibadan, and if he was, he has not been a prominent player in the ADC whose activities and members he has done his best to stay away from. As it is with the SDP, so it is with other smaller parties except the Aminu Turaki-led faction of the PDP that is currently being bankrolled by Seyi Makinde, the Oyo State governor.
What ADC scaremongers and others like them in other parties are afraid of and have been nagging about is the emergence of the APC as by far the most dominant party in Nigeria at this time. The structural and financial superiority of the APC is and should be of real concern to the ADC which, although is also emerging as the most dominant opposition party and rival of the APC, lacks the former’s structural and financial power. This alone could be a point of discomfort. The ADC as presently constituted is still a faction of a party, not even a coalition as claimed, of strange bedfellows, one in which each party leader under its fold remains autonomous as a free agent that could seek their political fortune elsewhere and at any time. We are beginning to see that with the move by Peter Obi who, together with his followers, have soured on Atiku Abubakar and have been visiting every political player for endorsement or a working relationship in his search for a free presidential ticket.
Atiku Abubakar is the spirit behind the formation of the ADC. But the person now galvanising the party and may be keeping it together as a so-called coalition is Seyi Makinde. That is for the money he brings to the table as the only sitting governor still identifying with the ADC. Governors are the main financiers of Nigeria’s political parties which is why they are powerful and widely courted. The few who could have assisted the ADC have since jumped ship to the APC, leaving the usurpers in the ADC financially vulnerable. Makinde is the financial backbone of the Turaki faction of the PDP and is turning out to be to the ADC, through his PDP connections, what Nyesom Wike was to the PDP between 2016 and 2023. The only difference is that his financial war chest is limited and he lacks the devilry and gritty toughness to enable him operate at the level of Wike.
Makinde is in fact an immature politician who capitalised on the excesses of his predecessor to become governor. Otherwise, he is better suited to follow where others lead. With a tendency to put his foot in his mouth, he is more of a lucky politician than an experienced one. His lack of maturity shows in the manner of his interventions, rushing in where angels fear to tread. He was a Wike follower in the so-called G-5 group that left the PDP in 2023. He, it was, who sponsored the annulled PDP October 2025 convention against good judgement. He was also the host of last week’s opposition summit. He has of late been dabbling in chieftaincy matters, creating chiefdoms and coronating kings in absentia as a would-be godfather. For all he cares, Makinde may be using the ADC for his own purpose, fighting for his post-governorship survival.
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