By Emameh Gabriel
The fragile architecture of Nigeria’s opposition politics has suffered its most public rupture yet, as the African Democratic Congress (ADC) and the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) abandoned any pretense of cooperation this weekend, trading accusations that cut to the heart of their respective presidential ambitions and exposed a rift that has been widening since the two camps parted ways earlier this year.
The latest flashpoint has roots in an earlier, equally contentious intervention. In September 2026, Kwankwaso publicly urged Atiku to abandon his presidential ambition and support the Obi-Kwankwaso ticket, citing the former vice-president’s age and health.
He went further, promising that Atiku “would be taken care of” if the opposition ticket won the presidency. The All Progressives Congress seized on the remark at the time, with spokesman Felix Morka accusing the opposition of “horse trading with the presidency they do not have, and will not have”.
Kwankwaso returned to the same theme during his Channels Television interview on Thursday, confirming that he had asked Atiku to step aside. “Well, yes,” he said, when asked directly. He framed the request as an appeal rooted in their decades-long relationship, dating back to the 1993 political movement led by the late General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua.
“His Excellency Vice-President Atiku Abubakar is somebody that I know fairly well. And we have done so much together with him in the past,” Kwankwaso said.
The ADC’s response came swiftly. Through its Director of Media and Publicity, Kola Ologbondiyan, the campaign council accused Kwankwaso of pursuing personal ambitions and, more damagingly, of acting as a “willing collaborator” for President Bola Tinubu’s re-election effort.
“What Kwankwaso is doing amounts to advancing President Tinubu’s interests. It is a familiar APC strategy to use willing collaborators within the opposition to create confusion, sow division and weaken the collective efforts to bring about political change,” Ologbondiyan said.
Kwankwaso did not take the assault lightly. In a statement posted on his verified X account on Sunday, he dismissed the ADC’s claims as “unfounded” and insisted the Obi-Kwankwaso ticket, popularly called the “OK ticket”, would not withdraw for any candidate.
“Let me state clearly and unequivocally: we will not withdraw our candidature for the ADC or any other party. We remain confident in our capacity, competence, and readiness to lead Nigeria,” he said.
He challenged the ADC campaign council to address Vice-President Kashim Shettima’s criticisms of Atiku’s economic proposals rather than focusing its fire on the NDC.
“The ADC-PCC would be better served directing its energy toward rebutting the serious allegations levelled against their candidate by the Vice President, His Excellency Kashim Shettima, instead of targeting me and His Excellency Peter Obi,” he said.
The origins of the current conflict can be traced to the ADC’s establishment as an alliance of prominent opposition figures. In July 2025, Atiku, Obi, Kwankwaso and a host of other political figures gathered at the Yar’Adua Centre in Abuja, united by a single objective: preventing a repeat of the 2023 election, when a divided opposition handed Tinubu victory with barely 36 per cent of the vote. The arithmetic was elegant: Atiku’s northern networks, Obi’s southern youth following, and Kwankwaso’s Kano grassroots base, combined into a single fist aimed at Aso Rock.
However, the ADC’s internal contradictions surfaced almost immediately. Obi and Kwankwaso moved first, formally resigning from the ADC in early May 2026 and joining the NDC, a party led by former Bayelsa governor Seriake Dickson. Obi cited a “toxic environment” within the ADC, alleging that the same “Nigerian state and its agents” that had destabilised the Labour Party were now infiltrating the coalition.
The ADC’s national publicity secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, offered a less charitable interpretation: Obi and Kwankwaso, he said, wanted a party that could simply hand them the ticket. “The kind of party Peter Obi needed was the one he is in now, a party that belongs to one man, who can guarantee him the ticket before he joins,” Abdullahi said.
Atiku then moved fastest among those who remained, securing the presidential ticket later in May 2026 with 1,846,370 votes at a primary that rivals Rotimi Amaechi and Mohammed Hayatu-Deen rejected as manipulated.
Obi, by then already gone, had reportedly been waiting for guarantees that the ticket would be handed to him, a demand the coalition structure could not accommodate. Kwankwaso’s position had been equally unsettled, with his camp eventually concluding that the ADC could not provide the platform they needed.
The defections effectively split the opposition into two competing blocs: Atiku’s ADC and the Obi-Kwankwaso NDC. For a time, both sides maintained the fiction that they were still working toward a unified front. As recently as mid-October, the G-100 coalition, a grouping of six opposition parties, was still convening meetings with Atiku, Obi and other candidates to discuss fielding a single candidate against Tinubu.
But the public exchanges of the past week have made clear that whatever unity once existed has given way to a contest over which opposition bloc can claim legitimacy, and which candidate can claim the mantle of challenger-in-chief.
With the election approaching, the two camps are expending energy on each other rather than on the incumbent. The APC has not been slow to notice. The party’s national chairman, Nentawe Yilwatda, openly mocked the infighting, saying he had “watched the videos and laughed” at the spectacle of ADC and NDC members exchanging insults. “In the last three weeks, APC is not fighting ADC or NDC. It is NDC versus ADC,” he said. The implication was unmistakable: the ruling party can afford to watch from the sidelines as its opponents do its work for it.
The ADC’s Ologbondiyan sharpened the attack on Kwankwaso’s political credibility, questioning his trajectory across five parties, from the PDP to the APC, back to the PDP, then the NNPP, the ADC, and now the NDC.
“Kwankwaso’s political journey calls for serious reflection,” he said, adding that the former Kano governor’s fourth place finish in the 2023 presidential election raised doubts about his claim to national influence.
He contrasted Atiku’s “cosmopolitan, detribalised” networks across the six geopolitical zones with Kwankwaso’s concentration of strength in Kano alone.
Kwankwaso’s counter was equally pointed. He dismissed the ADC as offering “no better alternative” to the ruling APC, insisting that the Obi-Kwankwaso ticket represents the most credible path to unseating Tinubu. “The APC-led government has failed Nigerians,” he said. “The ADC offers no better alternative. We believe the OK ticket presents a credible and viable option, backed by proven capacity, a strong track record, credibility, and broad support across both Northern and Southern Nigeria”.
For ordinary Nigerians who had hoped the opposition would coalesce around a single candidate, the open warfare between the ADC and NDC offers little comfort. The two parties may still be negotiating behind the scenes—the G-100 consultations continue, and Salihu Lukman, an ADC chieftain involved in the coalition talks, has insisted that opposition candidates will soon make public statements on the coalition’s direction. But the public exchanges suggest that whatever unity once existed has given way to something more familiar in Nigerian politics: a contest of egos and calculations, conducted in the open, with the ruling party as the principal beneficiary.
The question now is whether the ADC-NDC rift is a temporary rupture or a permanent fracture. If the two camps cannot reconcile before the election, the opposition’s dream of a single candidate, the dream that brought them together at the Yar’Adua Centre barely a year ago, will remain exactly that: a dream. And the APC, which has watched its opponents tear themselves apart, will have little reason to fear the consequences.
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