An Afternoon With His Excellency, Senator David Mark, GCON, National Chairman of the African Democratic Congress
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There are men who occupy the office, and there are men whose office is fortunate to have occupied. Senator David Alechenu Bonaventure Mark belongs to the second and rarer order.
I sat with him this afternoon. I came away with the settled conviction that this republic has not yet finished drawing from the well of this extraordinary Nigerian.
THE SOLDIER
Begin with the soldier, because everything else in the man begins there.
He is of Otukpo, born in April 1948. He entered the Nigerian Military School, Zaria, in 1962 as a boy, and left it in 1966 among the best of his set. He entered the Nigerian Defence Academy, Regular Course 3, in 1967, and was commissioned Second Lieutenant in 1970, in the very season this country was gathering itself up and beginning again.
Then came the long professional climb that most Nigerians never hear about, because it happened quietly and it happened well. Further training in the United Kingdom and in India, and a degree in telecommunications engineering. The Command and Staff College, Jaji. The National War College. The National Defence University in Washington. Harvard. Command appointments, instructional appointments, staff appointments. He rose to Director of Signals of the Nigerian Army and to the rank of Brigadier General.
In 1976, still a young officer, he was entrusted with the Abandoned Properties Implementation Committee in the old Eastern Region: the delicate and thankless business of settling who owned what after a war had torn the fabric of ownership to pieces. That is not an assignment you give to a careless man. It is one you give to an officer whose fairness you can vouch for in a room where fairness is the only thing standing between the country and another conflagration. He discharged it, and the country moved on. That is what competence looks like when it is done properly. Nobody remembers it, because nothing went wrong.
He went on to govern Niger State, and afterwards to serve as Minister of Communications from 1987 to 1990. There he reorganised NITEL and NIPOST, introduced the city coding system, built modern digital earth stations, and laid the platform on which the mobile telephone revolution in this country would later be raised. Every Nigerian holding a handset today is standing, whether he knows it or not, on ground that this man helped to clear.
He does not raise his voice. He does not need to. Command was never a matter of volume.
THE VERDICT OF HIS OWN PEOPLE
Now take the measure of his character, because capability without character is a common thing in Nigeria and it is worth nothing.
There is one test in our politics that cannot be bought, borrowed or litigated, and it is the standing verdict of the people who know a man best. Benue South returned him to the Senate five times and kept him in Abuja for twenty unbroken years. Twenty years is not luck. It is not one good campaign. It is a constituency looking at a man across two decades, in good seasons and bad, and declining every single time to replace him.
They had their reasons. He built a scholarship scheme that has carried children of that district through school. He established Joy FM in Otukpo, which put jobs in the hands of young people in a town where jobs are scarce and gave the grassroots a voice in its own tongue. He kept his home ground close, and it kept him.
And when the Senate was behind him and nothing further was required of him, he did not withdraw into a quiet estate. He set up a school of political mentorship to teach young Nigerians what this country is fast forgetting: patriotism, the rule of law, and the difference between winning an argument and governing a people. Addressing a graduating class only this year, he told them plainly that certificates guarantee nothing, that character and resilience are what endure, and that life is a marathon rather than a sprint.
That is a man spending his later years pouring back rather than drawing down.
Anybody can be admired at a distance. Very few are returned five times by the people who have watched them closest.
THE STATESMAN
Then came the Senate, and a legislative career without parallel in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic.
Benue South sent him to Abuja in 1999 and kept him there until 2019. In June 2007 his colleagues elected him President of the Senate. In June 2011 they elected him again. Eight unbroken years in the chair, across the sixth and the seventh National Assemblies. No Senate President in the history of this country has served longer, and none has presided over a period of comparable turbulence with comparable calm.
Remember what those years contained. Remember the early months of 2010, when a President lay gravely ill in a foreign hospital, no letter had been transmitted to the National Assembly, and the country stood at the edge of a precipice that has swallowed better organised nations than ours.
On 9 February 2010, the Senate under his presidency passed the resolution empowering the Vice President to act as President and Commander in Chief. The House of Representatives followed the same day. He explained the reasoning to Nigerians in language nobody needed a lawyer to interpret: where the Constitution had not contemplated the situation before the country, necessity had to supply what the drafters had not, and in doing so the sanctity of the Constitution as the ultimate law of the land was being preserved rather than broken.
That is not politics. That is statecraft. A grave national crisis was resolved that season by a resolution of the National Assembly rather than by a communique from a barracks, and the man in the chair was a soldier.
Understand what that says about him. He is the general who chose the gavel over the gun, and who then used the gavel with a general’s precision.
A lesser man would have waited for the storm to pass. He called the House to order and steered through it.
THE CHAIRMAN
And now, at a stage when other men would settle for the quiet enjoyment of a distinguished record, he has taken up the hardest assignment of his career.
The African Democratic Congress has not had an easy road. There have been storms. There have been headwinds. There have been long seasons in which the fashionable thing to say about this party was that it was finished. Through every one of them, one man has stood at the front of the column and refused to break formation.
He was invited to resign. He declined. He was told the party would not hold. He told the country the party was unshaken, and it has held. He has absorbed pressure that would have scattered organisations far older than ours, and he has absorbed it without theatrics, without bitterness, and without one public word of complaint.
They laid siege to a soldier and then wondered why the walls did not fall.
THE MEETING
Our conversation this afternoon went where every serious ADC conversation now goes. Not to grievance. Not to the past. To 16 January 2027, and to the single question that matters between now and then, which is whether this party will get it right.
He is under no illusion about the scale of the task. Neither am I. A general does not confuse a favourable wind with a finished campaign.
I came away from that office thinking about the method. Structure. Discipline down to the polling unit. Reconciliation where there has been friction. Mobilisation where there has been apathy. Protection of the vote from the moment it is cast to the moment it is declared. The unglamorous arithmetic that turns national goodwill into national results. That is the work in front of us, and there are no shortcuts through it.
And then he did something I will carry for a long time.
He acknowledged the work.
He spoke kindly of the daily, unheralded labour of The Narrative Force, of the messaging we push out day after day without pause and without fanfare. He knew what we had been doing. He had seen it. And he left me in no doubt that he values it.
I did not go to that office seeking commendation. But when a man who has commanded soldiers and presided over senators tells you that your work counts, you do not shrug.
That commendation does not belong to me. It belongs to every member of this team who writes, designs, argues and posts to effect a position change as they believe this country can still be recovered. They will read this. They should know the National Chairman sees them.
WHY ANY OF THIS MATTERS
Let me be plain about the stakes, because they are not abstract to the Nigerian who has read this far.
Nigerians are suffering. That is not a talking point. It is the lived, daily, grinding reality of the market woman, the artisan, the teacher, the young graduate, the pensioner counting coins. The food is beyond them. The transport is beyond them. The medicine is beyond them. What they have been offered in return is patience, and patience does not feed anybody’s household.
Atiku Abubakar offers something else. Not a manifesto but a managerial life. A man who built enterprises that carry thousands of Nigerians on their payroll, in a country whose political class has largely mastered the art of spending money without ever having made any. A man who put a university in Yola, in the North East, years before anybody in Abuja discovered that region on a security map. He understands production because he has produced, and he understands employment because he has signed the salaries.
And behind him, holding the party together and pointing it at the target, stands the general.
ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY EIGHT DAYS
That is what remains. One hundred and seventy eight days to 16 January 2027.
Not one of them is spare.
To every ADC member reading this, in Ekiti and in every other state of this federation, understand who is leading this column. A man who has served, who has governed, who has legislated, and who is now offering the last full measure of his public life to a country that has already had a great deal from him.
He has not asked us for anything he has not given first.
Let us match him. Let us register, organise, mobilise, persuade, and above all protect the vote. And on 16 January 2027, let us hand Nigeria back to the Nigerian people.
The general has taken the field. It would be a disgrace to leave him standing there alone.
Atiku is coming. And the suffering people of this country will have cause to rejoice.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General, The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
23 July 2026
