The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has pushed back against Peter Obi, with a top official flatly rejecting his reasons for leaving the party and declaring that no aspirant had been more favored within its ranks than Obi himself.
Bolaji Abdullahi, the National Publicity Secretary of the ADC, made the pointed remarks during an appearance on Arise Television’s Prime Time program, delivering what amounted to a pointed rebuttal of Obi’s public justifications for his defection to the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC).
In what observers may read as a carefully calibrated response, Abdullahi did not attempt to downplay the significance of losing both Obi and former Kano Governor Rabiu Kwankwaso—two of the country’s most prominent opposition figures. His candour was striking.
“I will be lying to say that their defection didn’t mean anything,” Abdullahi conceded, “because these are two significant frontline politicians in this country, and when you lose those two politicians, then you will feel that you have lost something.”
Yet in the same breath, the spokesperson was quick to temper any perception of crisis. “But it’s not a mortal blow,” he insisted, framing the departure as a political inconvenience rather than an existential threat to the party’s ambitions.
Central to Abdullahi’s argument was the ADC’s stated mission of building what he described as a “broad-based coalition,” a grand opposition alliance capable of unseating President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in the next electoral cycle.
“The reason we are building this coalition is that our individual parties have been destabilized,” he explained, “and the only way out was to come together.”
According to Abdullahi, a shared conviction had emerged among stakeholders that the nation’s political trajectory under the APC had become dangerously precarious, necessitating a unified front. “There was a consensus among us that the direction this country is going was quite precarious, and the only way we can win an election and rescue the country from the misrule of the APC is to build a party that is formidable enough.”
The departure of Obi and Kwankwaso, he suggested, reflects a fundamental philosophical divergence rather than any failure on the part of the ADC itself. “Obi and Kwankwaso have a different political idea of what the party should be doing,” he said plainly.
Perhaps the most rhetorically sharp moment of Abdullahi’s remarks came when he invoked Obi’s own previously stated position on opposition fragmentation, a position he argued now sits awkwardly alongside the former Anambra governor’s decision to join yet another separate political platform.
“Obi said himself that once we present two candidates against President Tinubu, we have given him a chance,” Abdullahi noted pointedly. “I wonder what has changed.”
The implication was clear: if Obi genuinely believed that a divided opposition was a gift to the incumbent, then his decision to exit the ADC and amplify that very division raises serious questions about the consistency of his political reasoning.
Obi had cited internal legal wrangling as among the factors that precipitated his exit, a characterization that Abdullahi categorically rejected. The ADC, he maintained, is not the legally embattled organization that some have sought to portray.
“If the legal challenges are the reason that we have left after creating the impression that ADC is drowning in these mountains of legal challenges, the answer is no,” he said firmly. “At the moment, we have only three cases, which are flimsy.”
While he was careful to add the caveat that he did not wish to be prejudicial in his assessment, the message was unmistakable: the legal narrative, in the party’s view, is being used as a convenient post-hoc justification for a decision driven by other considerations entirely.
Abdullahi saved his most stinging assertion for last. Directly addressing Obi’s implicit suggestion that he had been marginalized or treated unfairly within the ADC, the spokesman offered a flat contradiction.
“I can tell you that none of the aspirants and leaders have been favored like Peter Obi,” he declared, a statement that, if accurate, fundamentally undermines the former Labour Party presidential candidate’s narrative and reframes his defection not as a principled exit from a dysfunctional party but as a unilateral departure from one that had, by the ADC’s own account, bent over backwards to accommodate him.
As Nigeria’s opposition landscape continues to shift ahead of the next general election cycle, the public fallout between the ADC and two of its most high-profile recruits underscores the deep structural tensions that continue to plague attempts at building a credible, unified alternative to APC dominance.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
The ADC’s public rebuke of Peter Obi cuts to the heart of Nigeria’s perennial opposition problem: the inability to maintain unity when it matters most.
Despite the party’s claim that Obi was its most favored aspirant, he walked, and his stated reasons simply don’t hold up to scrutiny. With only three pending legal cases and a coalition built on the shared goal of defeating the APC, the ADC insists it is far from finished.
