THE LIFU JUDGMENT IS AS FLEETING AS A BABY’S LAUGHTER. NOTHING CAN SAVE TINUBU. INTIMIDATION WILL NOT SAVE HIM. HARASSMENT WILL NOT SAVE HIM. NOT EVEN A COURT ORDER CAN SAVE HIM. ON JANUARY 16, NIGERIANS WILL SHOW HIM THE WAY OUT.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
On Wednesday, our campaign rolled into Sokoto and the city answered with a turnout the whole nation saw. On Thursday, barely 24 hours later, a judgment fell in Abuja.
Nobody in Nigeria needs a seminar to connect those two days.
A party that is confident of victory does not need its opponent removed from the ballot. A President proud of his record goes out and defends it in the market square. He does not pray for a courtroom to do his campaigning for him.
That is why the noise we have heard since Thursday tells us more than the judgment itself.
THE DANCE THAT GAVE THEM AWAY
Watch the celebrants closely. The APC propagandists have been jubilating as if they had won the presidential election in a courtroom on a Thursday afternoon. They have filled the airwaves, flooded the timelines and run gleeful commentary from every studio that will have them.
Ask yourself one question. Why is a ruling party that claims it is in the hearts of Nigerians dancing over a factional suit inside another party?
Men do not celebrate the removal of an opponent they are sure of beating. They celebrate the removal of an opponent they fear.
Their jubilation is not a celebration. It is a confession.
The dance has given them away. In a stadium full of hungry Nigerians, the APC has shown us exactly whom it fears, and it is the man from Jada.
THE SAGE WHO SPEAKS FROM BOTH SIDES OF HIS MOUTH
Then there are those one would have expected to know better.
Take Senator Shehu Sani, now the APC’s senatorial candidate for Kaduna Central, and a man many Nigerians once credited with a sharp mind. On 2 July 2026, when Justice Musa Liman of the same Federal High Court upheld the transfer of the ADC leadership to Senator David Mark, Sani sneered. He mocked that the judiciary would now be called the last hope of the common man, and said this meant there was no plot to impose a one party state.
Four months later, the same Sani lectures our party to stop protesting and head to the Court of Appeal.
So when the court rules for the opposition, Sani mocks the judiciary. When the court rules against the opposition, Sani bows before it. This is not intellect. It is a weathervane dressed in agbada, turning wherever the wind from Aso Rock blows.
Our party holds one standard. We welcomed the judgment we won in July, and we are appealing the one we lost on Thursday.
Sani is not alone. In July, Bello Matawalle, speaking as Minister of State for Defence, told the nation that the judgment affirming our leadership had cleared President Tinubu of any accusation of interfering with the judiciary. We accept his logic and hand it back to him. If a judgment in our favour proved the courts were free of Tinubu’s hand, his party cannot now hold up a judgment against us as proof of anything at all.
THE DIAGNOSIS BWALA WROTE HIMSELF
And then there is Daniel Bwala.
Before he crossed over, Bwala gave Nigerians the most honest description of the APC mind we have ever read. On 25 November 2022, while he was still on our side of the field, he wrote that the human brain is unique and miraculous, that it works and functions optically [sic] 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, “UNTIL YOU JOIN APC, THEN IT STOPS WORKING.”
Nigerians did not have to wait long for the proof. Bwala is now Special Adviser to the President on Policy Communication. This week he rushed to the foreign press to say the APC is not involved at all in the suit against our party, and in the same interview condemned the Mark leadership as an undemocratic takeover.
If the APC is not involved at all, why is the President’s own adviser explaining the plaintiff’s case to the world?
You cannot plead innocence and deliver the closing argument in the same interview.
Bwala wrote the diagnosis himself. Today he is the patient.
A VACANT CHAIR IS NOT AN INHERITANCE
Now to the foolishness at the heart of all this celebration.
The whole edifice rests on one claim. When Chief Ralph Nwosu resigned as National Chairman, Nafiu Bala Gombe says the chair passed to him automatically, as if a political party were a family compound and the office a piece of farmland to be inherited.
Begin with the man himself. Our party’s position is clear, and we will establish it before the Court of Appeal: Nafiu Bala resigned as Deputy National Chairman and took part in the very process through which the new leadership emerged. A man who walked out of an office cannot turn around a season later and claim the higher office he left behind.
But let us give the celebrants everything they want. Let us assume, for argument’s sake, that Nafiu Bala never resigned at all.
What then makes him National Chairman?
Nothing. Being a deputy is not being made chairman. No National Executive Committee of our party ever met and confirmed him. No organ of the ADC ever ratified him. A deputy who was never made chairman by his party remains, at best, a deputy.
His own camp promised, back in 2025, that he would organise a national convention within 90 days. That convention never came.
Now read the Constitution itself. Article 14 gives a Deputy National Chairman the duty to preside at meetings in the absence of the National Chairman. Read it slowly, because it says three things the celebrants have refused to see.
First, absence is not vacancy. A chairman who has travelled is absent. A chairman who has resigned has left a vacant seat. A provision written for a man who is temporarily away cannot be stretched to crown a successor.
Second, presiding is not succeeding. To chair a meeting in place of the chairman is a duty for a day. It is not the office, its powers or its tenure. A deputy governor who chairs the State Executive Council in the governor’s absence does not become governor.
Third, even the right to preside belongs first to the Deputy National Chairman from the chairman’s own zone, and only in his absence to another deputy. Chief Nwosu is from the South East. Nafiu Bala was Deputy National Chairman for the North East. On the very article his camp brandishes, he was not first in line to chair a single meeting, let alone to inherit the party.
An office the constitution never gave him cannot be seized by a court.
Any party member with a working brain can see this at a glance. Perhaps Bwala was right after all about what happens to the brain once it joins the APC, because their propagandists cannot tell absence from vacancy.
So how does the ADC fill a vacant national office? Through its organs, never through self-proclamation.
Under our constitution, the National Convention is the supreme authority of the party and the body that elects national officers. Between conventions, the National Executive Committee governs. Article 19(12), as INEC’s own officer quoted it, allows the National Working Committee to perform the functions of the NEC only pending the next NEC meeting, for ratification.
Ratification is the soul of that document. Nothing in it makes anybody a national officer by himself.
Our leadership did not come by inheritance either. Chief Nwosu’s handover was taken to the party’s National Executive Committee, which met on 29 July 2025 and endorsed the Mark-led leadership. INEC recognised that leadership on 10 September 2025. On 2 July 2026, the Federal High Court held that the transfer of leadership did not violate our constitution.
The celebrants will point to the Court of Appeal’s majority decision of July, which voided our national convention of April. That matter is before the Supreme Court, where we are confident it will be set right. But read what that decision did and did not do. It held that our convention breached a court order. It did not elect Nafiu Bala, and it did not make him chairman. Striking down our convention does not hand him one he never held.
Even the other factions fighting over our party’s name have never recognised him. When the Kachikwu bloc held its own convention in May, it did not elect Nafiu Bala. It elected another man entirely as its National Chairman.
Now ask the celebrants a simple question. Which NEC of the ADC ever met and confirmed Nafiu Bala as National Chairman? Which organ of the party ever ratified him?
The answer is none.
Resigned or not resigned, the answer is the same. No legitimate process of the ADC has ever made Nafiu Bala its National Chairman.
TWO JUDGES, ONE COURT
There is more the celebrants hope you will not ask.
On 2 July 2026, Justice Musa Liman of the Federal High Court, Abuja, examined this same transfer of leadership and held that it did not violate the ADC Constitution. That judgment subsists.
It is a settled principle of our jurisprudence that a court cannot sit on appeal over a subsisting judgment of another court of equal jurisdiction. Thursday’s judgment came from the same Federal High Court.
The record also bears noting. In June 2026, it was Justice Peter Lifu who ordered INEC to deregister the ADC and four other parties. The Court of Appeal set that order aside.
We are going to that same Court of Appeal again, the court that has already set aside one Lifu judgment against our party.
Like a baby’s laughter, the Lifu judgment fills the room for a moment, and then it is gone.
THE DISTRACTION THEY NEED
Why this, and why now?
Because the APC cannot win the argument it fears most. It cannot campaign on the price of food in Sokoto, the cost of transport in Enugu, the school fees in Ibadan or the fear on the roads of Benue. So it needs the nation talking about affidavits, signatures and factions.
Every hour Nigerians spend arguing over Nafiu Bala is an hour they are not asking what became of their subsidy savings. Every headline about a courtroom in Abuja is a headline that is not about the empty pot in Kano.
That is the whole strategy. Change the subject. Exhaust the opposition in court. Pray the people forget their pain.
They can take us to every courtroom in the land. They cannot take the hunger out of the people’s stomachs.
The suffering Nigerian has not budged. The trader whose capital has been swallowed by prices, the graduate with no job, and the farmer who cannot reach his farm because of bandits have not changed their minds because a judgment was read on a Thursday.
The growing support for Atiku did not come from a court, and a court cannot take it away.
THE CAMPAIGN DID NOT STOP
Look at what happened the morning after. Atiku Abubakar said plainly that the timing of the judgment was no coincidence, and the Affordable Life campaign moved on to Kebbi as scheduled. Our National Legal Adviser, Professor Oserheimen Osunbor, a former Governor of Edo State, put it simply: this judgment will not stand.
The Campaign Council called the ruling an academic exercise overtaken by events. Our lawyers are at work. Our rallies continue. Our candidate is on the road.
That is the difference between a movement and a machine. A machine needs every switch in its favour. A movement keeps marching when the switches are turned against it.
GO HE MUST
Let the APC hear us clearly.
You can threaten our members. You can harass our leaders. You can cheer every suit filed against us and celebrate every judgment that comes your way.
None of it will feed one hungry Nigerian, and none of it will save you.
Tinubu cannot win this election in a courtroom, because he cannot win the people’s minds. A President who has to look to the courts to rescue him from his opponent has already told Nigerians what he thinks his chances are at the ballot.
On 16 January 2027, the suffering Nigerian people will answer him at the polling unit.
No amount of intimidation, harassment or court order will save Tinubu. Go he must.
Only 72 days remain to 16 January 2027.
#GoHeMust #Atiku2027 #AffordableLife #ADC #TheNarrativeForce
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
6 November 2026
