The ruling APC knows something about how opposition parties can come together, overcome their differences, create synergy around a single candidate, mobilise and defeat an incumbent president. They know the process very well because they did it between 2013 and 2015, when they came together, negotiated, agreed on how the candidate would emerge and then went ahead to agree on a consensus candidate.
The said candidate, Muhammadu Buhari was in a sense an easy candidate to agree on because the other leading contenders could see possibilities for themselves in the post-Buhari era. The outcome of the consensus position that emerged was that for the first time in the history of this country, a sitting President was defeated at the polls and handed over power peacefully in 2015.
Precisely because they know the script, the APC was not going to sit and watch what they did to others be done to them. There was therefore no surprise with the alarm, indeed panic, within the APC in June 2025 when the platform of the opposition coalition, the African Democratic Congress (ADC), was to be launched.
A few hours before the event, the organisers got a rude shock when the hotel they were to use abruptly cancelled a fully paid reservation. The Wells Carlton Hotel and Apartments in Asokoro, Abuja, said they had to cancel the event due to an unspecified “internal compliance matter.” The very late cancellation could only have meant some powerful people wanted to stop the inauguration of the coalition because they were afraid.
On numerous occasions before that time, the then major opposition, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, had been under sustained State sponsored harassment. The judicial machinery was effectively used by friends of the presidency to create legal impediments to party operations through the instrumentalisation of factionalism. In addition,