In May, at the Nigeria Democratic Congress’s maiden national convention, Senator Moses Cleopas made Nigerians a promise. He said the party was positioning itself to provide credible leadership and responsible opposition ahead of 2027. Justice, inclusion, accountability were all the ingredients that the party promised to bring to the table. He warned that true opposition must provide ideas, direction, accountability and credible alternatives for national progress.
But that promise would run into trouble before long.
A month later, Seriake Dickson was on Arise Television, where a question he would ordinarily have waved away drew an answer he did not need to give. The NDC national leader declared that no one was better qualified to run for president than he was. That Obi and Kwankwaso did not pay “one naira” for the platform. That nobody was doing the NDC a favour. “Rather,” he said, “the NDC, my colleagues and I are the ones offering people a platform.”
Between the party and the movement, the tension was already in the air, waiting for a spark.
The trouble began on Thursday, September 17, when the Obi-Kwankwaso Movement, known simply as the OK Movement, unveiled a 59-member presidential campaign council. The movement is a grassroots pressure group that has spent months mobilising support for the joint ticket of Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso, the NDC’s presidential and vice-presidential candidates.
The council it announced included directors for mobilisation, women’s affairs, strategy, security and legal matters, along with coordinators for all 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. The Director-General of the movement, John Ughulu, was named Director-General of the council; National Secretary Saadatu Sani was named secretary.
It was, by any reasonable measure, a sign that the movement was preparing for the work ahead. Two days later, the NDC disowned it entirely. In a statement signed by Cleopas, the party declared that the council did not emanate from the party and should be disregarded by the public and the media. The chairman warned that no individual, candidate or support group was authorised to constitute or announce a campaign structure in the name of the party without approval from the National Working Committee. He added that Ughulu would be referred to the party’s disciplinary organ over excesses during the primary election in Lagos State and repeated disregard for party authority.
The OK Movement responded the next day. Sani’s statement was measured in tone but firm in substance. The movement recognised the supremacy of political parties within their constitutional and statutory spheres. But it remained an independent political organisation with its own leadership, structure and internal processes. It would campaign for Obi and Kwankwaso, and for NDC candidates where it had resolved to support them. But it did not require the personal validation or approval of any individual before exercising its legitimate organisational functions. She called on Cleopas to familiarise himself with the NDC constitution before making sweeping assertions and demanded an apology.
By that same Sunday evening, the quarrel had already produced its first casualty. Francis Nnoli, the movement’s National Head of Operations, resigned. His reasons were structural: the OK Movement, he said, could not build a credible campaign outside the authority of the political party. He did not reject Obi or Kwankwaso. He rejected the confusion over who was in charge. Ughulu had spent weeks insisting the movement answers to no one. Nnoli decided it should answer to the party. One of them had to go, and it was Nnoli.
Reading the two statements side by side, one gets the distinct impression that two different conversations are happening. The NDC chairman is talking about party discipline and constitutional order. The OK Movement is talking about organisational autonomy and grassroots reality. Both have a point. Neither seems willing to hear the other.
But here is what should worry the NDC if it really wants to compete in 2027: it is not the only party with an interest in this fight. It is not even the most important player. The movement that Sani leads claims roughly 2.5 million registered members and coordinators, built ward by ward over months, largely on the personal credibility of its founder. Ughulu, based in Atlanta, is described in his own publicity as “The Morale Booster,” a best-selling author and leadership strategist from Edo State.
Whatever one thinks of such titles, the structure he built is not the kind that can be reassigned by a press release from Abuja. The movement itself warned as much in August, when it rejected merger proposals and said its state, local government and ward leaders would not continue under an arrangement that removed Ughulu or compromised its independence.
The Obidients, the Kwankwasiya movement and the NDC leadership all wanted something the others would not give. That is normal in politics. It is also how parties throw away a once-in-a-generation opportunity.
Cleopas may believe he is asserting the NDC’s constitutional authority. What he is actually doing is picking a fight with the people who have been doing the work his party has not yet begun. The NDC was only registered in February 2026. Its convention was in May. It has no national profile to speak of beyond the two names at the top of its ticket. The OK Movement, whatever its flaws, has been organising for longer than the party has existed. And now the party has told it, in public, that its work is illegitimate.
There is a word for this in football: own goal. The NDC had an opportunity to absorb the movement’s energy, to find a way to align structures without humiliating the people who built them. Instead, it chose to disown, to threaten discipline, to warn against parallel structures. The result is a public fight that makes the opposition look exactly like what Cleopas said it would not be: fractious, undisciplined and more interested in internal hierarchy than in the voters it claims to want to rescue.
None of this means the NDC chairman is entirely wrong on the law. Parties do have constitutions. Campaign councils, in the normal scheme of things, are constituted by party leadership. But politics is not a courtroom. And the timing of this confrontation, three years before the election, suggests a leadership that is more comfortable with control than with coalition-building.
Olusegun Adeniyi in one of famous writings, observed that Nigeria’s opposition parties had yet to demonstrate how they would defeat an incumbent, despite their frequent calls for voters to collect their PVCs. The challenge then, as now, was cohesion. The opposition’s biggest enemy has never been the ruling party. It has been itself.
The coalition that Atiku Abubakar put together fell apart because the people in it were never really on the same page. It wasn’t like the merger that produced the APC we have today, where the key players were ready to make sacrifices and support one candidate. In this case, almost everyone in the coalition had their eyes fixed on the presidential ticket, and nobody was willing to step aside for anyone else. That same problem was what forced Peter Obi’s Obidients and the Kwankwasiyya group out of the coalition and into the NDC just a few months after it was formed. It was a gathering of individual ambitions to seize power. That kind of arrangement hardly ever lasts.
The OK Movement will survive this. It has already made clear it does not need the NDC’s validation to exist. The question is whether the NDC will survive its own instincts. The NDC may just have handed its opponents a gift. If this is how the party intends to build a winning coalition, it may find that the only people left to discipline are the ones who never showed up.
By Emameh Gabriel
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