ADC Crisis: Atiku, Peter Obi Accused of Hijacking Parties for Personal Ambition
- The Tinubu Must Stay Movement linked the ADC leadership crisis to a broader pattern of opposition politicians taking over existing party structures
- TMS cited Atiku Abubakar's role in the ADC coalition and Peter Obi's political moves as examples of what it called opposition opportunism
- A Federal High Court judgment on November 5 invalidated the David Mark-led ADC leadership and Atiku's presidential nomination, with an appeal planned
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Abuja, FCT - The Tinubu Must Stay (TMS) Movement has accused opposition politicians of treating Nigerian political parties as personal tools for chasing presidential power, alleging that they seize control of existing structures, push out founding members, and walk away when their calculations go wrong.
Speaking in reaction to the November 5 Federal High Court judgment that invalidated the David Mark-led leadership of the African Democratic Congress (ADC) and Atiku Abubakar's presidential nomination, TMS director-general Marcel Ngogbehei said the ruling exposed a wider problem in opposition politics.
Source: Twitter
The court's decision followed a legal challenge brought by former ADC deputy national chairman Nafiu Bala Gombe. The ADC has indicated it will appeal the ruling.
ADC Crisis as a Recurring Pattern
Ngogbehei argued that Atiku and allied opposition figures effectively displaced the ADC's original founding structures when they adopted the party as their platform for challenging President Bola Tinubu ahead of the 2027 general elections. He said this behaviour raised serious doubts about whether opposition politicians were genuinely interested in building democratic institutions or simply looking for convenient vehicles to pursue personal ambitions.
TMS also pointed to former Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi's political journey as a parallel example. The movement recalled how Obi's influence reshaped the Labour Party ahead of the 2023 elections but left its internal structures caught up in prolonged leadership disputes. Obi left Labour in December 2025 for the ADC, and later moved again to the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) in May 2026 following disagreements within the opposition coalition.
TMS Contrasts Tinubu's Record
The movement drew a sharp contrast between this pattern and President Tinubu's political history, praising what it described as his commitment to building lasting political structures. TMS pointed to his involvement in developing the Alliance for Democracy, the Action Congress, the Action Congress of Nigeria, and ultimately the formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as evidence of a different approach to party politics.
Ngogbehei urged Nigerians to assess opposition figures not by the volume of their criticism of the government but by their record on internal democracy, institutional consistency, and organisational capacity.
He said Nigeria's democratic future depended on parties that could maintain internal order, honour their founding structures, and outlast the ambitions of individual politicians, rather than on the prominence of whichever presidential candidate a party happened to be hosting at any given time.
Legit.ng has previously reported on the leadership dispute within the ADC and the opposition coalition's efforts to field a unified candidate against President Tinubu in 2027.
Source: Legit.ng
