OPPOSITION FUELS ALARM OVER ADC CRISIS, BUT IS IT REALLY DESPERATION? BY TGF
GREATRIBUNETVNEWS–THE Transformative Governance Forum has slammed opposition figures for allegedly misrepresenting the INEC directive on the ADC leadership tussle as an act of desperation by the APC.
Key Issues:
– _”It is not desperation. It is due process.”_ – Transformative Governance Forum
– Opposition Reaction: Opposition figures claim INEC’s directive is an attempt to kill opposition and institute a one-party state
– _”Those who broke the law to seize a party now call law enforcement desperation. Those who never built anything now accuse others of destroying democracy.”_ – Transformative Governance Forum
– INEC’s Stance : INEC removed David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola’s names from its portal, citing a Court of Appeal ruling to maintain status quo ante bellum
– _”INEC has caved to pressure and has chosen to side with the government against the Nigerian people.”_ – Bolaji Abdullahi, ADC National Publicity Secretary
– ADC’s Position: ADC rejects INEC’s interpretation, alleging government pressure to destabilize the party
THE FULL TEXT BY THE MEDIA DIRECTORATE TGF
GREATRIBUNETVNEWS–THE Real Desperate Men: On Legal Order, the ADC Crisis, and the Cynicism of Opposition Noise–TGF
Desperation Has a Home – and It’s Not in APC or in INEC’S Legal Prudence
The Transformative Governance Forum has noted with utter disdain the now usual cacophony of alarmist noise from certain opposition figures — led by perennial contestants and retired power-brokers who have never once governed a single ward with integrity — attempt to reframe a straightforward legal and administrative matter as evidence of authoritarian consolidation.
They bizarrely characterized the INEC’s directive on the ADC leadership tussle as an act of desperation by the APC to kill opposition and institute a one-party state. We state unequivocally: It is not desperation. It is due process. This accusation is not only intellectually bankrupt but also reveals a deep-seated lack of convictions and worrying opportunistic tendencies within the opposition ranks. And those screaming loudest about it know precisely why it threatens them.
Those who broke the law to seize a party now call law enforcement desperation. Those who never built anything now accuse others of destroying democracy. The Transformative Governance Forum will not allow this inversion of facts to stand unchallenged.
The average discerning Nigerian saw this coming. We could read the ADC issue from a mile away. Why? Because the law is clear. Let us be absolutely clear about the sequence of events that the aggrieved parties prefer the public forget.
It was David Mark and Rauf Aregbesola who, with the brazenness of men accustomed to impunity, hijacked the leadership of the Action Democratic Congress (ADC) outside any constitutionally recognised party mechanism — no convention, no NEC meeting, no democratic mandate of any kind. This Forum asks a simple and damning question: where were the so-called defenders of democratic norms when that act of naked institutional seizure was carried out? Not one prominent voice from the opposition’s current choir of outrage uttered a word of legal caution. Not one. Their silence then was not oversight — it was complicity.
> “What is more desperate than seizing a political party the way a bandit seizes a vehicle on the highway — without process, without mandate, and without conscience?”
Now that the original, legitimate custodians of the ADC have exercised their lawful right to challenge this hijacking in the appropriate forums, we are told this constitutes political and worse, electoral desperation. This is a breathtaking irony. It is not politics; this is intellectual laziness weaponized as propaganda.
The desperate act was the seizure. The legal remedy is precisely that — a remedy. And the courts, as they must, are doing nothing more than examining the records and facts placed before them. What about those records that so frighten the opposition? That is the question every discerning Nigerian should be asking.
We note, with particular interest, the role of former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and other establishment figures in amplifying this narrative. These are men whose political careers have been defined by the very transactional and anti-democratic practices they now profess to abhor. Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi have contested presidential elections across multiple party platforms — not because of any ideological evolution, but because political parties, to their ilk, are mere vehicles for personal ambition, to be boarded and abandoned at will.He now champions the ADC as a beacon of opposition. The same ADC that was restructured overnight without a single delegate in a hall! The irony is so thick it could choke a room.
> “They chose the ADC — not out of conviction, not out of ideology — but to weaponise its name and confuse APC voters. That is not opposition politics. That is sabotage dressed in democratic clothing”.
Let us also address the gravest of the accusations — that these developments represent a march toward a one-party state.This charge is, frankly, an insult to the intelligence of Nigerians. The opposition has not been barred. It has not been banned. It has been held to the same constitutional and legal standards that govern every political party in this Republic. If Atiku, Mark, Aregbe, Amaechi, Tambuwal and their allies genuinely believe in robust opposition, nothing in Nigerian law prevented them from registering a new party, building it from the ground up, and earning their electoral base with policy and conviction. That they lacked the intellectual and political capacity — indeed, the courage — to do so tells you everything about the quality of opposition on offer.
They chose the ADC not for principle, but for confusion. The intent was to sow electoral mischief among APC voters.
This Forum names that strategy for what it is -Gbajue_ politics.
If Mark and Aregbe were genuine, why did they not simply join the ADC and then call for a convention or NEC meeting to either elect or affirm a new leader? Why the shortcut? Let no one cry desperation now. This is purely a legal issue and an internal party affair.
We present, for public record, the charges of genuine desperation that belong squarely at the feet of those now wailing:
The desperate act was Mark and Aregbe’s hostile seizure of a registered party’s institutional machinery without any democratically sanctioned process.
The desperate calculation was the deliberate choice of ADC — not as a home of conviction, but as a tool of electoral disorientation targeting APC voters.
The desperate silence was the opposition’s studied muteness when the original party constitution was violated — a silence that now stands as an indictment.
The desperate noise is the current performance of outrage by men who have never built a democratic institution but are now suddenly its self-appointed guardians.
The desperate wish is the hope that Nigerians are too politically inattentive to trace this crisis back to its actual authors.
The TGF rooted in the social democratic traditions — in the legacy of those who built institutions rather than plundered them — affirms without equivocation that the rule of law is not the enemy of opposition. It is, in fact, the opposition’s only reliable protector. Those who undermine legal process when it suits them and invoke it when it doesn’t, deserve neither sympathy nor credibility.
We call on all Nigerians of discernment — journalists, civil society, academics, and ordinary citizens — to apply consistent scrutiny to these events. *Ask not who benefits from the noise, but who authored the crisis.The answer, in this case, is unmistakable.
The Transformative Governance Forum stands firmly on the side of democratic process, constitutional order, and the political education of the Nigerian public. We will continue to name distortion wherever it appears — regardless of how loudly, or from how high, it is amplified.
ISSUED BY THE TGF MEDIA DIRECTORATE
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