By Olakunle Abimbola
But for Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola’s mix-up in it all, ADA and ADC — ADC, like LP, clearly the latest whore in town for high-wire political hire — are a vortex of ironies.
In 2013, a dummy APC — African People’s Congress — leapt from nowhere, as soon as the legacy opposition coalition announced their merger into APC — All Progressives Congress — now the ruling federal party, since 2015.
But the moment INEC held that the dummy APC had breached section 222 (a) of the 1999 Constitution, with insufficient information for registration, it vanished to nowhere. Wrecking APC’s formal registration had proved a mission impossible.
Like 2013, like 2025: two ADAs — All Democratic Alliance and Advanced Democratic Alliance — were out there. It’s not clear though, which is fake, which is real.
Still, unlike their fake APC ancestors-in-farce, one of the ADAs — which the Atiku-led coalitionists had pushed to empty into — dropped the enterprise like a steaming hot pot: they sighted a naughty alter ego at the registration party! But that’s even the more civil interpretation of the burlesque.
A less flattering account claimed the Atiku ADA scrammed the moment their social media tormentors forged for them a cynical logo — Ada (Yoruba for cutlass!) — to replace the ADA originally proposed logo of a corncob!
In 2013, the real APC prevailed, the fake sunk. In 2025, both ADCs may well sink sans trace. But we’ll have to wait.
Even then, this stillbirth ADA’s flee into ADC mimics yet another parallel: a 2019 exodus into this same ADC, registered since 2006, but largely dormant.
In his trademark bluster, former President Olusegun Obasanjo had announced, with media drums and cymbals, that he had midwifed a political third force, outside APC and PDP — his sour grapes for being scorned by both, despite his venomous letters.
That idea was a damp squib. It didn’t fly beyond a dig at mutual opportunism.
Among those at that dig was the SDP (the poor clone of the original that powered MKO to epochal victory in 1993) that wanted to use Obasanjo, as Obasanjo wanted to use it.
But it all collapsed after the imperious Ebora Owu told Oba Olu Falae, then SDP national chair, to surrender SDP’s registration certificate; and Oba Falae told the Ebora to go dive into the nearby Ogun River!
After all the movement without motion, Obasanjo canonized ADC as pick for his 2019 election racket. Again, at the polls, ADC made absolutely no impact.
But the ADC electoral crash isn’t the story. The parallel of SDP-to-ADC pre-poll transit, in a futile bid for power, is. Nothing mirrors that now than the impulsive Nasir El-Rufai.
The former Kaduna governor boomed he had stormed into SDP, gobbled it up, and was summoning every political malcontent to come join him there to root out the ruling APC — pure gas!
But as Falae called Obasanjo’s bluff, SDP leaders called El-Rufai’s. As Obasanjo and his fictive “third force”, El-Rufai and loud coalition fled SDP into ADC! It’s true: history repeats self as farce — but only after avoidable tragedy!
Indeed, top hierarchs of new hire ADC come with a baggage.
David Mark, a former brigadier-general, comes with two high blights. He was not only spine of the political military’s conspiracy against June 12 (the harbinger of this democracy), he threatened — by the late Prof. Omo Omoruyi’s account — to shoot President-elect MKO Abiola, should anyone dare to swear him into office.
Yes, MKO never hit Aso Rock. But Mark too failed to halt the re-advent of democracy, even if it came as a poisoned chalice, aka Army Arrangement (AA) — high blight No. 1.
Ay, Mark romped back as elected Benue senator, in the democracy he had tried to kill, when their AA birthed, under Gen. Obasanjo, in 1999. But fate would have the last laugh: he sunk, with the PDP defeat of 2015, as the last Senate president of the PDP era — high blight No. 2.
You then can imagine the propaganda ruin, en route to 2027, for ADA: its gifted cutlass logo, with Mark as protem national chair! Mark and co dodged that bullet with the ADC landing! But they all gained boos and jeers of treachery from a prostrate PDP!
For ex-PDPs, Mark and co, apparently, that crippled behemoth is useless without its frenetic slogan — power! — which doubles as its lethal fixation!
With Obasanjo’s rear shadow over ADC and Mark as its fake face, it’s the PDP military wing on the prowl again! How they’ll fare, after their 2015 collapse, is left to be seen.
With treachery, Atiku Abubakar stands fairly docked in the PDP court: Vee-Pee for eight years (1999-2007), two presidential slots much later (2019 and 2023) that ended in blistering defeats — even after moonlighting with AC (2007) and APC (2015) — yet Atiku’s payback is preening in his ADC hire cap and daring PDP to come join or die!
PDP’s grand sin? Hesitating to gift Atiku yet another ticket, for a putative hat trick of defeats in 2027! Atiku, the “northern candidate”, wiped out PDP from much of the South in 2023! Now he, the born-again pan-Nigerian, wants PDP to vaporize into ADC to brew his umpteenth presidential ticket!
This is beyond treachery. It is crass entitlement, powered by a fox-trotting ingratitude! Does Atiku ever ponder his legacy, beyond his desperation for presidential power?
Then Peter Obi: only less peripatetic, in political opportunism, than Atiku himself! From APGA, to PDP, to LP — and now to ADC? The motor mouth, that talks 19 to the dozen, straddles to find his bearing! Perhaps some soapy yarns and China stats would help?
But Obi wastes his time haggling over a ticket. He has the “capacity, competence and compassion” — to mimic Obi-speak — to form the Demagogues Party of Nigeria (DPN) and be a shoo-in as presidential candidate. His Obidient zombies would be ecstatic!
Then, the pair of El-Rufai and Rotimi Amaechi — the one PDP minster and APC governor, the other PDP governor and APC minister — proved themselves, as worthy of either party’s technocratic bastion, with plausible tenures.
But their policies are brilliant as their politics is lousy! That explains why both have unravelled, because of self-stabbed political gashes.
O, for a toast of grace, English romantic poet, John Keats would have roared! Amaechi bawling: “I’m hungry! I’m hungry!” all over, as some uncouth Roman pleb. El-Rufai blowing his tops in rude and crude TV screeds and graceless X posts!
Then, the take-away tri-absurdity: Atiku, Obi and Amaechi claiming they’d do only one presidential term, should they get the ADC ticket! After selves, they can tell that to the marines! Over that, trouble would soon brew in paradise!
So, how did Ogbeni Aregebesola, the most ideologically driven politician of his generation, get mixed up with this wild breed? How?
The air is filled with treachery, ingratitude and allied moral strictures. But the hard question, after the Awolowo-Akintola crisis of the 20th century: is 21st century Yoruba political conflict resolution still as tame as it was in the 1960s? Sad to ponder! Where are the elders?
But a word for the ruling APC. At least, the new ADC should lure it out of a false complacency of everyone collapsing into its ranks, with PDP in death throes. Politics!
Now governance. Until the APC economic reforms morph from fancy numbers to bulging tummies, the ADA — sorry, ADC — pretenders, with their Obi demagogues, will fancy their chances of selling sweet poison — just as Donald Trump did to poor America!
