By Azu Ishiekwene
This is the last thing the African Democratic Congress (ADC) wants to hear, but it has to be said, even if the party digs its thumbs in its ear. It began with the party’s delayed registration.
When things were not moving as quickly as the early defectors, mostly from the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), had expected, they accused the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) of stalling the registration and of using the Ralph Okey Nwosu-led faction to stoke the delay.
The party was eventually registered in June. But that didn’t end the beef. As the PDP crumbled and many of its members, especially the governors, defected, the ADC accused the APC of coaxing, bribing or blackmailing them to turn Nigeria into a de facto one-party state. That was after their failed argument that whether all the governors in Nigeria defected to the APC or not, it would still not save the ruling party from a damning voter’s verdict next year because of its poor record.
Choosing a chair
The latest argument is that the APC is about to use the playbook it used to destabilise the Labour Party and the PDP against ADC: plant a leader to weaken it, break it up, and factionalise it.
A statement by the party on Monday accused the ruling party of planning to use the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to recognise an expelled member of the party, Nafiu Bala Gombe, as the ADC national chairman.
Why? “To ensure that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu emerges unopposed as the only serious candidate on the ballot in 2027.”
I don’t know what other conspiracy the ADC might find before the next market day, but I think the party is its own biggest problem. If it continues this way, before the APC kills it, it will be long dead, and on its grave would be the epitaph: here lies the remains of a party that thought it would get power à la carte!
How not to take power
Power is not given. It is taken, even seized, through planning, organisation, and action. The ADC was not formed to last, the way you build a house from the ground up, brick by brick, patiently working every stage, and following a pattern. It’s mainly a coalition of the aggrieved, desperate for power, after some of the principal actors in the ADC damaged and abandoned the PDP.
We know more about the presidential ambitions of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and Rotimi Amaechi than we know about what the party really stands for.
Recently in Benin, Edo State, there was a spat between Odigie Oyegun and Rowland Owie, both octogenarians and ex-PDP stalwarts-turned-ADC, over whether the South-South should back Amaechi or Atiku, with Obi’s supporters smarting in the corner. There’s more being said and done to secure the presidential ticket for any of the three than we know about efforts to build the party. In what has become a crude reversal of the core principle of the political party as an institution, parties have become disposable paper wraps, and defection a con art.
An inconvenient history
The fate of political parties in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic tells a concerning story.
Between 1999 and 2015, when the PDP was at its peak, the party still managed to share the political spoils in a manner that gave democracy a future and a promise. President Olusegun Obasanjo had won the presidential election with 62.78 percent of the vote, an absolute majority that knocked out Olu Falae, his challenger, who was the consensus candidate of the All Peoples Party (APP) and the Alliance for Democracy (AD).
The PDP controlled 21 of 36 states, while the APP and AD controlled 9 and 6 states, respectively. PDP also secured 59 of the 109 senatorial seats and 206 of the 360 House of Representatives seats back then. It must therefore be a wonder to political historians that in less than 27 years of being such a formidable organisation, the PDP has become difficult to find, even if only to be mummified as a carcass.
The question, What happened, finds a lazy but convenient answer in blaming Tinubu, even though the worm eating up the opposition is inside the opposition.
11 to near zero
After the 2023 general elections, the PDP – the wreckage from which many ADC members emerged – had won 10 governorship seats: Adamawa, Akwa Ibom, Bauchi, Delta, Enugu, Oyo, Plateau, Rivers, Taraba, and Zamfara, with the 11th being Bayelsa in the off-cycle elections. These were enough to give the party a fighting chance, if its leaders were serious.
The three main legacy parties of the APC (ACN, CPC, and ANPP), which defeated the PDP in 2015 with a helping hand from PDP defector-governors, controlled only 11 states. In fact, after the 2003 election, Lagos was the only AD state in the South West, the other five consumed by the PDP.
At the last count, however, the PDP had lost its former traditional strongholds in the South-south, South-east, and North-central to a gale of defections. Governors with one eye on re-election and others seeking the lucrative retirement to the Senate have almost entirely bailed out from the PDP like paratroopers from a falling aircraft.
In a cruel reversal of fate, the party is the victim of the bad example it set in political brinkmanship, where there are no consequences for defectors who join or leave the party, taking their seats with them. Of the 11 governors as of May 2023, only two – Bala Mohammed of Bauchi and Seyi Makinde of Oyo – remain in the PDP faction.
Mohammed, who had made a spirited effort to draft former President Goodluck Jonathan into the 2027 presidential race, watched his dream collapse while the party unravelled under a maze of litigations, defections and turf wars. And rumour has it that Bala is on the verge of leaving whatever may be left of the PDP’s umbrella with Makinde any time soon.
Watching the optics
The optics across Nigeria point broadly at a singular outcome in next year’s general elections – a victory lap for the ruling APC. Not because of a sterling record of performance, but because the opposition, especially the ADC, has paved the way by making itself not an alternative platform for change, but a place where a few desperate politicians lock horns for power.
I laugh whenever the ADC calls itself an opposition party. It is almost an opposition. You will be shocked to learn that a leading ADC figure is willingly prostituting himself to the APC top hierarchy to secure his endangered business interests.
Verdict of history
In the end, the biggest opposition to the APC will be the APC. That’s the lesson of history. From Britain’s Conservative Party to the Indian National Congress, and from the African National Congress to the remnant of Nigeria’s PDP (which would soon adopt Tinubu as its candidate), history shows that ruling parties eventually decay and decline from within.
A combination of complacency, internal fragmentation, and failure to adapt to new demographics, or corruption and loss of moral authority, eventually catches up with and overwhelms them.
The APC’s case will not be different, not because of the noise being made by the ADC, but despite it.
Ishiekwene is the Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP and author of the book, Writing for Media and Monetising It.
