WHEN news filtered in that the African Democratic Congress had marched to the Indepeendent National Electoral Commission(INEC )headquarters in Abuja, demanding the resignation of chairman Joash Amupitan, and that they opened proceedings by singing the old national anthem, I must confess, I paused. Not because the gesture wasn’t dramatic enough. Because it was perhaps too dramatic.
There is something almost theatrical about the image: former Senate President David Mark, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, former Governors Rauf Aregbesola and Chibuike Amaechi, Labour Party’s 2023 presidential candidate Peter Obi, and the Kwankwasiya movement’s Rabiu Kwankwaso all standing shoulder to shoulder, belting out “Arise, O Compatriots.”
Some of Nigeria’s most seasoned political operators, united in song, marching on the electoral commission. It would have been stirring genuinely stirring if not for one inconvenient question: where was all this unity when their own party was tearing itself apart?
Let me explain what actually happened here. INEC reviewed a Court of Appeal judgement handed down on March 12 and, in its reading of an order to maintain “status quo ante bellum,” removed the David Mark-led National Working Committee of the ADC from its correspondence register. The Latin phrase ,ante bellum, meaning the state before the war immediately became the hottest term on Nigerian social media. Emergency lawyers materialised from every corner of the internet. Constitutional scholars appeared on timelines where football arguments usually live. Everyone, suddenly, had a considered opinion on whether INEC had the right to interpret a court order. I have lived in this country long enough to know that nothing unites Nigerians faster than a good Latin phrase and a common target.
The ADC’s letter to Amupitan was strongly worded, to put it mildly. It accused him of gross misconduct, abuse of office, violation of constitutional boundaries, breach of the doctrine of separation of powers, and threatening democratic pluralism. That is quite a charge sheet for a man who says he was only following a court order. For a commission whose primary statutory function is to conduct elections not to arbitrate party factional warfare some of those allegations warrant genuine examination.
To be fair to the ADC, they do have a legitimate institutional point, and one would be intellectually dishonest to dismiss it entirely. If INEC acted on its own interpretation of a live and contested court ruling particularly in a manner that appeared to favour one faction over another that is a real constitutional concern. Courts interpret their own orders.
Administrative bodies implement them; they are not supposed to editorialise or take sides in the interpretation of judgements that are still being contested before the federal judiciary. The doctrine of separation of powers exists for a reason, and if Amupitan overstepped the boundaries of that doctrine, it ought to be said plainly and challenged appropriately. The appropriate venue, however, is a courtroom, not a press conference.
But here is where the ADC’s strategy reveals its own contradiction. The commission chairman responded on Arise TV in terms that were measured and precise. He said INEC did not wake up one morning and make an arbitrary decision. There was a court order. He warned the ADC that proceeding with congresses or conventions in defiance of live court proceedings could invalidate election results after the fact.
He cited Zamfara and Plateau State as precedents and those are not trivial examples. Anyone who remembers the Zamfara debacle, where candidates who won elections were stripped of their seats because the party failed to comply with legal processes, knows the INEC chairman was not speaking theoretically. The courts, as Amupitan rightly noted, are where this dispute belongs. Not the streets outside Maitama.
So we have a standoff. And into that standoff, the opposition has thrown every prominent name it possesses. David Mark, Atiku, Amaechi, Obi, Kwankwaso, Aregbesola ,the combined political weight in that protest is remarkable. One social media wit described it as “a gathering of all the presidents Nigeria never had.” That line is funnier than it should be, and sadder than it looks.
But the same question persists. If the ADC’s tent is big enough to hold all these heavyweights, why can it not hold its own internal processes together? The party has been visibly fractured for months. Two factions. Two sets of leadership claims. Two narratives pulling at the same structure. And now, when the consequences of that internal fracture have landed at INEC’s doorstep, the instinct is to blame the referee. This is a habit with our politicians. When the house is in flames, find an external villain and redirect the cameras.
INEC, it must be said, is always available for this role. The commission has accumulated enough genuine vulnerabilities over the years questions of impartiality, conduct during previous election cycles, credibility with significant portions of the electorate that accusations directed at it are never entirely implausible. That pre-existing ambiguity is precisely what makes the commission such a convenient scapegoat. You do not need to prove the case conclusively. You simply need to plant enough doubt, and the political soil in Nigeria is fertile enough to grow that seed into a full narrative.
Let me say something that may be unpopular. Nobody destabilises a party that has no cracks to exploit. The All Progressive Congress(APC )understands this. Every ruling party understands this. Political resources are not spent disrupting an opposition that is running efficiently and presenting a credible threat. You find the fault lines, and you widen them that is how power operates in any political system, Nigeria included. The ADC’s current crisis did not begin with Joash Amupitan or with any court order. It began inside the party itself with unresolved leadership questions, factional maneuvers, and the particular kind of grievances that accumulate when powerful men occupy the same room and nobody is willing to finish second.
Will I say the APC is innocent in all this? No, I will not say that. It would strain credulity to imagine that a party with the resource base and intelligence-gathering capacity of the ruling APC was genuinely unaware of, or quietly indifferent to, the opposition’s disarray. No ruling party weeps when its opponents are in chaos. That is human nature, and Nigerian political nature especially. The APC has every incentive to watch this crisis unfold without intervening. The question is whether that passive satisfaction amounts to active interference and that is a question for the courts and, eventually, for the electorate to answer.
But here is what I know with certainty: Amupitan is not resigning. He has said as much. The legal battle over that March 12 court order will be decided by judges, not by protest marches or strongly-worded letters handed to INEC officials at the gate. And while the opposition is busy composing its charge sheets and staging its demonstrations, the calendar is moving. Elections do not wait for a party to sort itself out. Structures need to be built. Candidates need to emerge from legitimate, uncontested processes.
The electoral machinery of a credible opposition needs to be running, not sputtering.
There is a larger civic argument here that gets buried in the noise. Nigeria needs a functional opposition not as a matter of partisan preference, but as a basic condition of democratic health. A ruling party that faces no credible electoral threat eventually stops being afraid of the electorate. It stops calculating consequences.
It begins to govern as if tenure is a birthright rather than a mandate. The opposition’s role is to prevent that by making those in power genuinely afraid of losing it. An opposition in permanent internal crisis cannot perform that function. An opposition whose members migrate from party to party every electoral cycle because the last vehicle collapsed is not inspiring confidence. An opposition that spends its energy fighting itself is an opposition that has already handed the next election to the incumbent.
The ADC has an unusual collection of political talent available to it right now. Former vice presidents. Former governors. Former ministers. A 2023 presidential candidate with significant national followership. If this assembly of experience, networks, and resources cannot hold a party together through an internal dispute, that is not primarily an indictment of INEC. It is an indictment of the political culture of the men involved.Fix the house. Call the warring factions to the table. Retain competent legal counsel and get proper judicial clarity on what that March 12 ruling actually requires.
Stop handing the ruling party the gift of your dysfunction. Nigerians who want a genuine alternative to the current administration need something credible to vote for ,not just a collection of prominent names standing outside a commission headquarters singing anthems from the past.
The INEC saga, in the end, is a symptom. The disease is within. And no amount of Latin phrases, protest marches, or resignation demands will treat what ails a party that has not yet decided what it actually stands for and who it truly belongs to.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.