At the heart of the crisis threatening to tear apart the African Democratic Congress (ADC) is a broken promise, a carefully negotiated power-sharing agreement that was signed, sealed and quietly abandoned the moment a new leadership took office.
That is the account of former Senator Clifford Abbo of Adamawa State, who has become the latest prominent voice to publicly trace the origins of the ADC’s troubles to a specific act of bad faith; the denial of a promised position to Nafiu Bala Gombe, former deputy national chairman from Gombe State, who had stepped down in good faith to make room for an incoming leadership bloc.
The consequences of that decision, Abbo alleges, have snowballed beyond an internal party disagreement, drawing in a serving APC governor from the South East, a powerful minister from the South South and an influential figures within the Presidential Villa, all of whom, he claims, have exploited the original grievance to pursue their own political agenda against the party.
When Senator David Mark and former Osun State governor, Rauf Aregbesola were being eased into the positions of national chairman and national secretary of the ADC respectively, the transition was not uncontested. It required negotiation, concession, and compromise.
The legacy ADC structure agreed to stand down and cede ground but not without conditions. Across the country’s six geopolitical zones, specific positions were allocated to accommodate those who were giving way.
In the North East, the agreed compensation for Nafiu Bala Gombe, who resigned his more senior role as deputy national chairman, along with the entire outgoing National Working Committee was the position of national vice chairman, North East.
“The agreement was signed and sealed,” Senator Abbo wrote in a detailed statement. “Nafiu Bala stepped down from a higher office in good faith. The position of national vice chairman (North East) was his reward. Everyone knew it.”
What happened during the constitution of the new National Working Committee under Mark’s chairmanship, Abbo alleges, was a straightforward breach of that agreement.
Gombe’s name was quietly dropped from the position promised him. In his place, Babachir David Lawal, former Secretary to the Government of the Federation under President Muhammadu Buhari and a towering figure in North East politics, was installed in the slot that had been negotiated for Gombe.
The reasoning attributed to Lawal for the substitution was, by Abbo’s account, openly dismissive. The suggestion, he alleged, was that Bala was too junior a figure to occupy such a position in a zone that counts a former vice president and a former SGF among its political sons.
As a face-saving alternative, Bala was offered the position of Zonal Financial Secretary, several rungs below what had been agreed. He rejected it.
“Nafiu Bala felt belittled and insulted,” Abbo wrote. “And in belittling him, they belittled all of us.”
A deeply aggrieved Bala, according to Abbo, did not accept the slight quietly. He began mobilising. Together with a retired Department of State Services official from Adamawa State, Abbo alleges, Bala reached out to contacts within the Presidential Villa, laying the groundwork for a coordinated campaign to destabilise the Mark-led ADC structure.
What followed, Abbo alleges, was the weaponisation of that grievance by far more powerful political actors who had their own reasons to want the ADC weakened. Court cases were filed.
Behind the litigation, he claims, stood a serving South East governor and a former North West minister who assembled legal teams to prosecute the challenge.
“This is no longer just about Nafiu Bala,” Abbo wrote. “Bigger interests have latched onto his grievance.”
Abbo further, alleging that the regulatory pressure being applied by the Independent National Electoral Commission against the ADC is not coincidental.
He named a “very powerful minister from the South South” as the architect of INEC’s recent actions against the party, operating with the backing of other political actors.
Most strikingly, he alleged that within the Villa, individuals are actively competing to claim credit for the ADC’s troubles as a way of demonstrating loyalty to the President.
“Inside the Villa today, everyone is claiming to be responsible for the ADC crisis, just to curry favour from the President,” he wrote, painting a picture of a political culture in which the destruction of an opposition party has become a prize worth boasting about.
Despite the scale of the crisis, Abbo stopped short of calling for a complete rupture. He appealed directly to Gombe to withdraw the court case and allow the party to recover, saying Bala had already made his point.
He also issued a sharp warning to INEC, saying the commission’s current leadership risked being remembered as worse than Maurice Iwu, if it did not reverse what he described as a politically motivated agenda against the ADC.
On the Adamawa State chapter of the party, Abbo warned that the same forces behind the national crisis were now engineering instability ahead of forthcoming congresses at the state level.
“I know much on this matter,” he said. “I promised to be sincere, honest, bold, and truthful. The full names of the key actors, their sponsors, and the full extent of Villa involvement will one day be documented, captured in one chapter of my autobiography. For now, the chapter being written is one the ADC and Nigerian democracy cannot afford.”
Last weekend, the APC weighed in, urging the Mark-led ADC leadership to follow due process and stop what it described as attempts to mislead Nigerians over the leadership dispute.
APC National Secretary, Ajibola Basiru, also dismissed calls for the removal of INEC Chairman, Prof. Joash Amupitan and INEC commissioners.
The ADC has not officially responded to the specific allegations raised by Senator Abbo.
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