And where are the people in all this? Absent. Not by choice, but by disillusionment. Unlike the APC’s emergence in 2013, there is no groundswell. No electricity in the air. No slogans on the lips of street traders and okada riders. What we have instead is a press release coalition, a boardroom strategy with no street roots. And politics, in a country like Nigeria, is not hatched in closed rooms. It is forged in the feverish expectations of a long-suffering people. That expectation is absent here.
To merge is not to build, and to build is not to recycle. The current charade parading itself as the ADC coalition is not the birth of a national alternative but the theatre of the familiar ambition without vision, and movement without destination.
Those who speak of this ADC coalition in the same breath as the 2013 merger that produced the All Progressives Congress (APC) either do so out of ignorance or out of deep cynicism. For while the APC was forged, whatever its later contradictions around a national momentum for rupture, what is now before us is a regrouping of exhausted gladiators seeking oxygen in the political arena, not for Nigeria, but for themselves.
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Let us recall: the APC was not born in a vacuum. It was the child of mass discontent with a PDP that had calcified into a machinery of impunity. The APC, in its infancy, spoke the language of national rescue; its very conception rode on the shoulders of a restive populace tired of inertia, of rigged processes, of squandered hope. The people marched ahead of the political elite. They owned the mantra of change before any manifesto was printed. That, at least, was its historic legitimacy.
What then is the animating spirit of this new ADC arrangement? What is its programme? What grievance of the masses does it channel? What popular uprising does it mirror? What social contract does it propose? Nothing. What we see instead is a loud silence, a union not of ideological affinity or mass consensus, but of worn-out strategies and recycled tensions.
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Let us not deceive ourselves. The key actors in this theatre are not newcomers to Nigeria’s political misfortune. Their names are not whispered in the back alleys of the status quo, they are the architects of it.
Peter Obi, a man once hailed for administrative prudence now flirts with the dangerous politics of identity. His 2023 campaign, regardless of its intent, fermented regional, religious, and class divisions. What started as a digital rebellion ended in a discourse too narrow to carry a national message. The messianic cult that emerged was more alienating than inspiring, a symptom of the problem, not its solution.
Atiku Abubakar, the itinerant politician whose decades-long campaign for power has become less of a political journey and more of a ritual. The ideology is power. The method is defection. The result is predictable: once structures do not bend to his desires, he implodes them from within or deserts them outright. In every house he has entered, his shadow has preceded collapse.
Peter Obi, a man once hailed for administrative prudence now flirts with the dangerous politics of identity. His 2023 campaign, regardless of its intent, fermented regional, religious, and class divisions. What started as a digital rebellion ended in a discourse too narrow to carry a national message. The messianic cult that emerged was more alienating than inspiring, a symptom of the problem, not its solution.
Nasir El-Rufai, brilliant in intellect, brutal in governance. Kaduna, under his watch, became a metaphor for failed social engineering. Bloodshed, displacement, and polarisation were the wages of reform without empathy. If the coalition offers him as a strategist, then it sells a roadmap with no bridges for the living.
And where are the people in all this? Absent. Not by choice, but by disillusionment. Unlike the APC’s emergence in 2013, there is no groundswell. No electricity in the air. No slogans on the lips of street traders and okada riders. What we have instead is a press release coalition, a boardroom strategy with no street roots. And politics, in a country like Nigeria, is not hatched in closed rooms. It is forged in the feverish expectations of a long-suffering people. That expectation is absent here.
We must be careful. Political memory is not a luxury; it is a necessity for survival. The same actors now presenting themselves as saviours have taken turns steering the country toward the brink. Their fingerprints are on the levers of today’s dysfunction. To believe they will now rescue the country is to believe that vultures can give birth to doves.
In truth, what the ADC merger offers is not renewal but realignment. Not revolution but rotation. Not ideology but an inventory of political careers seeking market value. There is no programme, only packaging. No mass movement, only media noise. It is not a coalition for national rebirth, but for elite repositioning.
Of course, APC is not without its battles. But under the stewardship of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, hard choices are being made: from subsidy reform to fiscal recalibration and security restructuring. These are not crowd-pleasers, they are nation-builders’ decisions. The path is not easy, but it is not deceptive.
In truth, what the ADC merger offers is not renewal but realignment. Not revolution but rotation. Not ideology but an inventory of political careers seeking market value. There is no programme, only packaging. No mass movement, only media noise. It is not a coalition for national rebirth, but for elite repositioning.
To the vigilant citizen, this moment calls not for silence but for clarity. Nigeria cannot afford to stumble into another experiment authored by those who begot its crisis. The future we seek cannot be constructed with the bricks of the past. To rescue Nigeria is not to reassemble its political relics; it is to reimagine its very foundation.
The merger of 2013 had a soul whether it lived up to it or not. The coalition of 2024 is a shell. To confuse the two is to betray history and betray the people once more.
Aliyu Samba writes from Abuja and can be reached via [email protected]
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