By Washington Osa Osifo,(Esq), Ph.D.
A new political coalition of former Vice President, ex-Senate President, former Governors and party leaders publicly announced the African Democratic Congress (ADC) as its electoral platform for the 2027 general elections on 2 July 2025. The coalition aims to pool together the disjointed opposition against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. But closer scrutiny shows that this attempt is replicating the very structural and strategic shortcomings that helped undo prior opposition formations.
An insight into the durability of the new coalition presents characteristics of a weak pre-electoral alliance that is elite driven and ideologically shallow. The coalition is already enmeshed in divisive politics on party control and administration, jostling for party primaries or raising consensus candidate for the presidential election. These design elements have already put the coalition at risk of collapse before the 2027 polls.
First, the ADC coalition is driven by elites, it has no evidence of mass mobilisation, no grassroots penetration, and is not doing anything serious yet to connect with Nigeria’s growing youth electorate. In other words, like previous coalitions, the ADC lacks a well-developed policy agenda, organisational depth, and a transparent internal procedure for candidate selection, all of which have historically undermined the opposition in Nigeria. This is like the behavioural logic described in elite theory; indeed, coalitions become instruments of ambition, not of ideological coherence.
The ADC itself has not yet built the institutional foundations to act as a serious platform for contestation for national powers. It had whittled performances in the 2019 and 2023 general elections where it did not win in state elections, but marginally only won a House of Representatives seat in Kogi State in the 2023 elections.
The adoption of the ADC by the coalition leaders signals the absence of a genuinely new party structure to replace the old and further reinforces the pattern of treating an existing small party as a tool for fleeting electoral purposes without an accompanying long-term institutional investment. This fragility is evident, as one faction in the ADC led by Dumebi Kachikwu has gone so far as to publicly question the legitimacy of the coalition’s adoption of the ADC, describing it as a “hostile takeover” and has warned to pursue his faction’s grievance in the courts. This intra-party rupture shows elite dis-consensus and institutional disaggregation due to lack of inbuilt procedural checks on other partners in the coalition.
By contrast to the institutional safeguards found in the emergence of APC through coalition by merger in 2013, the ADC coalition seems to lack elite cohesion, regional balancing and procedural design. The 2013 APC merger has been the only successful manifestation in electoral terms, and even then, it was in exceptional circumstances: in the context of the overall discontent with the PDP, elite cohesion across geopolitical blocs, and a significant investment in organizational unity. These preconditions do not currently exist for the ADC-led coalition. The players themselves stay ideologically scattered and regionally divided, with the machinery of discipline or policy coherence being demonstrably absent. Even worse, candidates are making personal declarations without any previously agreed-upon power-sharing arrangement. For example, a former Minister of Transport in Buhari Administration, Rotimi Amaechi and the presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 presidential elections, Peter Obi have voiced their individual commitment to a single term as President should either of them get the ADC presidential ticket for 2027 presidential election. Such personal declarations without an internal consensus show that untimely aspirations have already split the coalition.
The ambitions of coalition leaders often erode the ability of a collective opposition to act in concert in Nigeria. For example, the 2018 – Coalition of United Political Parties (CUPP) was an ‘unwieldy coalition of unequal partners’, marked by internal distrust and squabbles for leadership positions. Kingsley Moghalu popularly described CUPP as devoid of substance, “a coalition action that is driven less by the desire to reorganise Nigeria or to pursue the common good than by individual ambitions and the ego of political leaders”. Such disunity was reflected in real political punishment, as the Action Alliance officially withdrew because of ‘lack of legal structure, poor leadership and dwindling relevance of the CUPP. Such contestation is common in Africa, where domestic opposition coalitions crumble without enforceable power-sharing arrangements.
For political opposition movements in Nigeria, attaining a viable vehicle for electoral victory requires a deft negotiation of the highly fragmented ethno-regional political landscape that marks Nigerian politics. A good example of this can be found in the 2013 merger of the All-Progressives Congress (APC), which attracted electoral support across major geopolitical zones, the North-West, South-West and to some extent the Middle Belt, thus fulfilling the majoritarian and federal character conditions in Sections 134(2) of the 1999 Constitution. For a presidential candidate to be duly elected, he has not only to secure a majority of votes cast but must also garner at least 25 per cent of votes in at least two-thirds of the 36 states of Nigeria as contained in this constitutional provision.
The newly forming opposition coalition in 2025, which now adopted the African Democratic Congress (ADC), is, however, more structurally fluid. Although this expands its formal base, it is too early to firmly determine whether the coalition can mobilise in all six of Nigeria’s geopolitical zones (especially the North-West, North-Central and South-West, which need to be reached to satisfy the spread requirement). Hasty Conclusions would ignore new uncertainties over elite bargaining, scale of voter realignment and possible institutional mediation within the coalition. Thus, unless we see empirical evidence of consolidation across regions and activation beneath the national level, the coalition may struggle to endure.
The electoral regime in Nigeria penalises regionally imbalanced electoral formations, and the evidence so far seems to suggest that elite endorsements (however well-meaning) would fail to convert elite endorsement into electoral validation unless carefully couched within both vertical and horizontal integration across federal units. The destiny of the ADC-led alliance will depend on its ability to make a genuinely national footprint, in both organisational structure and electoral reach, which already seem unlikely. As the alliances that preceded it were unable to garner the necessary national spread for legitimacy, the ADC-led effort could meet the same fate without expansive regional integration and a motivated national base level of support.
As former vice-presidential candidate of the Labour Party in the 2023 elections, Datti Baba-Ahmed rightly puts the stakes of the new coalition in electoral geography into perspective when he rhetorized that “there is no a Buhari in this coalition, a man who garnered 12 million votes in three consecutive presidential elections, nor a calculating, well-resourced, distant and visionary Tinubu”. These comments underlined the absence of a viable electoral national anchor for the ADC coalition, stretching beyond simple mass constituency support, to reach the extent of both strategic depth and inter-regional cast of appeal. This is to argue that the political viability of coalitions in presidential systems requires both mass legitimacy and elite pacts, neither of which we have observed so far in the 2025 coalition of ADC.
The main cause of collective opposition failure has been the supremacy of elite self-interest and factionalism in Nigerian politics. According to elite theorists of the classical perspective like Mosca (1939) and Pareto (1963), it is not the masses that govern the political systems, but rather the small and cohesive elite, whose objective is mainly the preservation of power. Such an elite caste is not differentiated by party ideology in the Nigerian space; rather, it is a fluid, opportunistic, personalised, and clientelist network. According to Higley and Burton (2006), regime stability and transformation are attributable to elite circulation, not elite cohesion. The political elite in Nigeria is still fragmentary and non-consensual, consisting of factional players that do not possess a collective strategic vision or institutional loyalty.
Political parties and coalitions behave less as institutionalised vehicles of political contestation and more like tools of elite bargaining. As a result, opposition actors are not very disciplined strategically and do not build the discipline necessary to maintain collective action. We can see this through the blowback to the ADC coalition, where elite consensus seems lacking as several aspirants for the presidency have already appeared in the public domain. The latest round of internal conflicts erupted because of the distribution of vice-presidential tickets, with Datti Baba-Ahmed even coming out publicly to say Peter Obi should not get the vice-presidential slot after all. And that office should not be a consolation prize. This intra-coalitional contestation embodies unassuaged elite enmity and political-dealership trepidation.
ADC is therefore the logic of personalist ambition, as opposed to collective ideological commitment. It looks like everybody is still only interested in his or her candidacy as coalition actors continue to remain stuck in a zero-sum game where there is no trust, no buy-in, and no coordinated action, highlighting the shortfall of elite political altruism needed for continued coalition unity. This fragmentation is a perfect example of elite disunity with competing ambitions undermining the consolidation of a united opposition band.
Furthermore, the incentives for coalition involvement are nearly never programmatic. Rather, they are informed by political survival mechanisms, elite reintegration, or patronage structures. Elite defection rarely stems from ideological variances or policy shifts. Instead, they are frequently the result of personal ambition, competition over party primaries, or loss of access to patronage networks in the ruling party. Elite defections from the ruling party frequently precede coalition formations in Nigeria. These are driven by ambition and exclusion from internal party structures and ultimately lead to the establishment of ‘temporary political shelters’ rather than ideological movements. This pattern in such a time-wasting drama setting of intra-party marginalisation that can be found in the 2013 decampments of Alhaji Atiku Abubakar and Senator Bukola Saraki from PDP to APC ahead of 2015 presidential elections which the party they left lost.
Therefore, coalition making in Nigeria’s fourth republic, especially the 2025 ADC-coalition formed ahead of the 2027 general elections have been thwarted by the interaction of fragmentation among certain segments of the elite, weakly institutionalised opposition parties, and structural obstacles created by the nature of the Nigerian hybrid political regime. This effort by the elite alone, around yet another collectively owned umbrella vehicle, stripped of ideological coherence, mass-based legitimacy or institutional consolidation, to unseat the President, is reminiscent of failed elite formations of the past such as AD-APP alliance of 1999, CNM of 2018 and CUPP of 2019. Only the 2013 coalition of APC has triumphed and without such remarkable alignments, the current coalition of ADC does not have the political, organisational and ideological muscles to reproduce the victory of APC of 2015.
Baba-Ahmed (2025) provides a particularly pertinent cautionary insight: “The very reason that a coalition was able to defeat a sitting government once may be the reason.it fail this time” Mobilizing the same set of leaders who effectively led Nigeria into precarious economic situation can not reenact the 2015APC success.
Premised on the above, it is my considered contention that, there is manifest danger that the current coalition may most likely lapse into an old set of scripts of spectacular failure, wrongly believing that rounding up disgruntled elites is all it takes, while failing to recognize the strategic adjustment needed to contend with a clever, entrenched opponent. However, while it may still be too early to make a definitive judgment, but the ADC-led coalition shows the same early signs of underlying institutional and strategic weaknesses that undermined past alliances.
Washington Osa Osifo,(Esq), Ph.D.