The eventual transfiguration of the National Opposition Coalition Group (NOCG) into a formidable political force on the platform of African Democratic Congress (ADC), obviously ranked the highest, most important political discourse in the country since last week.

Understandably, the prominence and intensity of the political discussion and debate it has generated is expected. The transition was meticulously concealed and packaged to send a frightening warning signal to the All Progressives Congress-led (APC) government that the political David is on a rampaging mission to destroy Goliath’s towering ambition.

The roll call of the political belligerents that graced the event across party lines, comprising the APC, Labour Party (LP), the New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP), and the main opposition party, the PDP, was very intimidating.

In attendance were the former presidential candidate of the PDP, Atiku Abubakar, his LP counterpart, Peter Obi, former governors like Rotimi Amaechi, Rivers; Nasir El-rufai, Kaduna; Aminu Tambuwal, Sokoto; Liyel Imoke, Cross-River; Gabriel Suswan, Benue; Sule Lamido, Jigawa; Abdulfatah Ahmed, Kwara; and Emeka Ihedioha, Imo, past and present National Assembly members like Senator Tony Nwoye, Enyinnaya Abaribe, John Akpanudoedehe, Victor Umeh, former Senate President, David Mark, and Dino Melaye.

Other political heavyweights that attended were former Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, former APC national chairman, John Odegie-Oyegun, his PDP counterpart, Uche Secondus, former ministers like Bolaji Abdullahi, and Solomon Dalung, among several others.

Setting the ball rolling, Senator Dino Melaye, who anchored the event, had deliberately rattled, preposterously, the ruling party continually, including warning everyone to purchase and constantly wear helmets to prevent being crushed by flying weapons. He warned that the Senator David Mark-led ADC national leadership will deploy perfectly articulated strategies with military precision to destroy and dismantle the elements in the APC-led government.

“Senator Mark and his team have the intellectual mobility and political sagacity to confront these directionless elements in power. They have all that it takes to bring down the political Goliaths in the APC. Every Nigerian should put on a helmet, the battle is going to be fierce,” he warned, crowning it with a comical song, “Na our party be this ooo we know get another one, our party be this ooo.”

Subsequent speeches from erstwhile ADC national chairman, Ralph Okey Nwosu, and the interim chairman, Senator Mark, were targeted at discrediting the ruling party in the eyes of an average Nigerian.

Apart from the scary, startling revelation that two former military heads of state, Olusegun Obasanjo and Ibrahim Babangida, have graciously endorsed the transition, Nwosu hinged on surrendering his party to the coalition after 18 months of deliberations, on the mission to rescue Nigeria from its tragic situation.

He said, “Our beloved country, tragically, is in an ICU, hungry, haemorrhaging and gasping for breath. Our mortuaries are overflowing with bodies that families are poverty stricken to claim. Our roads, farmlands are death traps. Just look around you, insecurity has metastasized, kidnapping and mass abduction across all the 36 states, with ransom rackets, banditry continues to blight lives in the North-West, devastating farming communities and crippling agricultural output.

“Even with Benue State alone, any sane person will wonder, has our government collapsed. Under President Tinubu and the APC governments across Nigeria, this carnage has worsened with their palliative economy. While human lives perish, these people bask in sanctimonious euphoria clouded by their smallness, clannishness, bigotry, and ungodly wastefulness.

“I don’t want to talk about fuel price and the coastal N15 trillion inglorious circuses. Senator David will deliver us; by the way, Rauf, himself, and his new team will navigate moving forward. As I step down, as we step aside, I pledge unwavering support. Whether I hold a position or not, my devotion to the ADC project remains unshaken. My guiding principle has always been that leadership transcends title, living in our actions wherever we are,” Nwosu noted.

But, if Nwosu was mild in painting the ugly picture of the hopelessness in the country, his successor, the ADC interim national chairman, Senator Mark, was more pungent and poignant in chiding the APC government and accusing it of crumbling the country to an irredeemable level.

“Let it be known to all, that this coalition groups go beyond gaining political power. It is a concerted effort to rebuild the crumbling pillars of Nigeria’s democracy. Today marks the beginning of what we believe will be a long, difficult, and tedious journey.

“However, it is a journey we are prepared to undertake, united in our collective belief that no price or sacrifice is too high in the service of our fatherland. It is on record that within two years of the current administration, we have observed with absolute dismay the hijack of all democratic institutions and a creeping descent into total civilian dictatorship.

“The blatant destabilisation and infiltration of all major opposition political parties is aimed at achieving only one objective: to enhance total state capture and leave Nigerians with no alternative or options come 2027. This coalition is to prevent our country’s descent into a one-party state.

“We have never seen a government so much at home with corruption, a government that disdains accountability in all ramifications. A government more concerned with the next election rather than the survival of the ordinary Nigerians. A government so totally consumed with politicking that governance is abandoned, while the majority of our people wallow in hunger and poverty.

“We have never seen this level of insecurity across the length and breadth of our nation. Bandits and kidnappers kill Nigerians at will and daily. Yet, this ongoing tragedy has not moved the government to any action that would stop the mindless killings and stem the tide of needless bloodshed. Indeed, the Nigerian people deserve a government that protects them and makes them feel safe in their own homes,” he lamented.

Speaking further, the former Niger State Military administrator, said; “equally disturbing is the total emasculation of the legislative institution. Never in our history have we witnessed a National Assembly where legislators, the trustees of the very bastion of our democracy, saddled with the sacred duty to protect Nigerians from misuse of executive power, are reduced to cheerleaders and praise singers of the president, head of the executive arm.

“Without doubt, the transformation of the National Assembly to a mere appendage of a presidential authority is a dangerous conspiracy against the people. It is the reason the government can get away with various whimsical, unconstitutional policies, actions, or inactions that have reduced more Nigerians to abject poverty and widened the boundaries of insecurity and fear,” he said.

However, observers believe that it will be farcically an understatement to claim that the attacks and obvious threats from the gathering of the opposition did not rattle the ruling party. For instance, Bayo Onanuga, President Tinubu’s spokesperson, warned Nigerians against paying attention to the coalition, describing them as desperados aiming to set the country back by decades.

“My advice to Nigerians: Keep your eyes wide open. A political party with no clear agenda or ideology, whose members are united only by their hatred for President Tinubu, cannot be good for our country. It will only set us back by decades.

“They want power at all costs because they cannot endure another four years in the political wilderness or be banished to political winter and irrelevance. What is certain is that the group will soon unravel due to their irreconcilable personal ambitions,” Onanuga quipped.

Similarly, the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Felix Morka, had questioned the philosophical or ideological leaning of the coalition or its new party aside from desperation for power at all costs, by all means necessary and unnecessary.

“The vaunted opposition coalition platform of choice, the ADC, was unveiled with a gasping whimper, not the roar that its promoters loudly touted. However, in reality, it was an unveiling of a coalition of hoaxers and self-obsessed merchants of vendetta, a roll call of Nigeria’s me-or-nothing politicians, who equate their selfish interest with the interest of Nigerians, who cannot bear to be out of the corridors of power and patronage, who are desperate to grab power for themselves by guile and subterfuge, who lay claim to an immoral birth right to power, even while draped in odious record of betrayal of public trust, and rapacious public service.

“Not surprisingly, the speech delivered by Senator Mark, the alleged national chairman of ADC, was disgracefully vacant, without substance or purpose, nothing but stitches of untruths, diatribe, and regurgitated and baseless allegations against the APC-led administration of President Tinubu.

“From beginning to end, Mark said nothing about the purpose of the so-called coalition other than a loud declaration of desperation for power. What value does the coalition bring to Nigerians? Why should any Nigerian be concerned about a coalition of a bunch of egotistical maniacs for whom power and patronage are the oxygen on which their lives depend? One would have expected that, after months of vacillating between the devil and the deep blue sea, in search of a host platform, Senator Mark and his co-travellers would take Nigerians seriously enough by telling them what their coalition would do differently regarding the administration’s bold economic and sectorial policy reforms,” the ruling party said.

As if the responses from the presidency and party’s leadership were not enough, loyalists like the minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, was even more ferocious in launching offensive personal attacks on the prominent members of the coalition, singling out his arch rival, Amaechi, Mark, Atiku, Malami, Aregbesola, and Bolaji Abdullahi for castigation.

But, aware of the magnitude of the severity of the battle ahead, coalition ADC spokesperson, Bolaji Abdullahi, told Daily Sun that the intensity of the battle will be bloody because the APC-led administration, in control of the state apparatus, will unleash every available arsenal at its disposal to crush the coalition forces.

Describing the fight as APC versus the people of Nigeria, Abdullahi said that the main mission of the coalition is to provide a credible alternative to the Nigerian electorate.

“The coalition’s principal duty is to save Nigeria’s democracy by giving people at least one alternative. Let the ideas compete, let the APC market its credentials of over four years when the time comes. Let the coalition show what we can do better and differently, and let Nigerians decide. That is democracy. It doesn’t call for a fight; it doesn’t call for all this name-calling and abusing people. It doesn’t call for all that,” he said.

Beyond the destabilising attacks from the presidency and the party, pundits have already started expressing doubt over the possibility of the coalition actualising their desired target due to their inordinate personal ambitions.

For example, as at last count, three of the coalition members, Atiku, Obi, and Amaechi, have already declared interest in contesting. Although many pundits banked on the permutations of Atiku sacrificing his ambition and supporting Obi to contest perhaps on a joint ticket with El-rufai or Obi surrendering his ambition to contest with Atiku as running mate. Formidable as the ticket looks, their body language does not seem to support it for now. More curiously, the coalition’s inability to attract serving state governors to support the project has raised further questions about its capacity to make an appreciable impact or even succeed. (Daily Sun)