The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has raised the alarm that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s (PBAT) administration is orchestrating a plot to destabilise the opposition coalition in the country. The party made this position known in a statement issued on Monday, July 7.
According to a statement endorsed by the ADC Interim National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party has credible intelligence that the aim of the meeting called by the All Progressives Congress (APC) “is not for national security or peacebuilding. It is to intimidate, coerce, and, if possible, co-opt these individuals into a fabricated scheme against the opposition coalition. This is not politics. This is sabotage.”
The statement further stated that the motive of the meeting is to sow confusion within ADC, delegitimise its new leadership, and derail its rising momentum as the new face of the opposition in Nigeria.
APC has fixed Thursday, July 24, for its National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting, a decision that was announced less than 72 hours after members of the opposition coalition unveiled ADC in the nation’s capital, Abuja.
“The July 1st Coalition Declaration and the July 2nd unveiling of the ADC have clearly rattled the ruling party. It is now obvious that the Tinubu administration—having lost the trust of the Nigerian people—cannot withstand the pressure of a united and credible opposition. But rather than correct its ways, it has resorted to its old playbook of destabilising opposition parties.”
In the statement, Mallam Abdullahi emphasised that “The coalition movement is an idea whose time has come. This party belongs to every Nigerian who is tired of lies, manipulation, and hardship. It belongs to every Nigerian who wants to restore decency, vision, and justice to governance. We would, therefore, not allow a handful of desperate men to turn Nigeria into a one-party dictatorship. And it would be our patriotic duty to resist it with every democratic means available to us.
“We call on President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to take note of these sinister moves by some of his appointees and call them to order. The president needs to prove to Nigerians that he is indeed a Democrat. He needs to remind his men that if the Goodluck Jonathan administration were as intolerant and as subversive of the opposition, the APC would not have come to power in 2015, and he would not have been a President today.”
