The ongoing leadership crisis in the African Democratic Congress was a disaster everyone who is a Nigerian saw coming. Everyone except those bent on reaping where they had neither sown nor watered. Some members of the party in fact read the writing on the wall and gave the impression they were prepared for any eventuality. They boasted they knew what to do, should ‘the come, come to become’. Which is not the same thing as saying they should willy-nilly be fair game to their opponents, particularly the ruling party, no matter what obstacle is thrown on their path. But they should at least have been alert and attentive to such possibility. Or so they pretended. 

In an Arise News interview with Charles Aniagolu, Nasir el-Rufai had spoken of a Plan B for the motley crowd of usurpers, wanderers and disgruntled losers that suddenly swamped the ADC in search of a political home in July last year. He talked about a fallback position should their planned takeover of the party backfire. Eventually they did not only take over the party, they moved straight into its leadership as if it was their destiny to do so. Where else is that kind of decapitation, a hostile takeover disguised as a smooth transition of authority, possible but in a setting populated by renegade politicians, retired coup plotters and pork sharers masquerading as democrats? Yet, their supporters see nothing wrong with this! They were as they are still blind to the sheer criminality and imposition of subverting the political process for the sole purpose of immediate gratification. 

What is wrong with setting up their own party when they found the heat of their former homes unbearable? But no, they are too impatient for that. Neither builders of parties nor nurturers of men, they must reap where they had not sown.  Monkey dey work, baboon dey chop. They are baboons that would rather reap the reward of the monkey’s hot sweat. But over and over again, we have seen this happen but refused to learn the appropriate lesson: that many of our politicians are businessmen and women who set up or join political parties with the undeclared purpose of putting their political parties or themselves up for sale. Managed by political nonentities sometimes called founders, these parties exist just on paper. The so-called founders establish branches of the parties across the country in order to fulfil the demands of electoral regulators and the need to be on the ballot. They share leadership positions but have zero membership, except for their cronies and members of their families. 

As political players, they exist only to participate in activities that are at best geared towards doing no more than to muddy the waters by serving as agent provocateurs and obstacles on the path of serious actors on the political stage. Mere shell companies, these parties are left dormant until their founders find willing buyers to whom they are offered on the highest bid. I mentioned this in my commentary here on February 11 when I cautioned against the so-called real-time transmission of election results: ‘An opposition that is stubbornly insistent on real time transmission of results seeks a potent judicial ambush…. If the majority must agree to it, it should be by consensus not brazen imposition. And when they do, they should realise that they have consented to the creation of a force majeure that would as likely as not leave the country in such legal bind that will only overinflate the relevance of marginal political parties and their promoters.’ 

Until last week, how many Nigerians outside the closed circle of ADC politicians knew Nafiu Bala Gombe, the apparatchik that has locked horns with David Mark and company over the disputed leadership of that party? He occupied the sinecural position of Deputy National Chairman, North-East. After getting the buy-in of Ralph Nwosu who bargained away the party he chaired, the ADC arrivants considered every other member of the party dispensable. Nafiu Gombe was allegedly ousted under these circumstnces. Babachir Lawal, a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, became the beneficiary of that position. As former Senator Elisha Abbo is now telling Nigerians, Babachir Lawal thought Nafiu Gombe inconsequential enough to be unfit to be regional Deputy Chair under the new arrangement in the ADC. Why should this surprise anyone? Babachir Lawal, vacuously arrogant, is a man who obviously lacks the finer attributes of decorum (remember his ‘Who’s the presidency quip’ at State House reporters in 2017 or his on-air, crude rebuke of TVC’s Nifemi Oguntoye? ‘Shut up!’ he barked). 

David Mark, a soldier-minister who didn’t think the average Nigerian deserved to use a telephone, a man whose antecedent in the hostile acquisition of power and the truncation of the democratic will of Nigerians ala June 12, 1993 and earlier, is well-known- it takes men of such constitution like him, Babachir Lawal and his disdain of those he considers his inferiors (even when they are not), to join grizzled politicians and other fly-by-night power mongers that control the Mark faction of the ADC leadership to contemplate and execute the kind of despotic takeover of the ADC as was perpetrated. Only coupists could do that. 

Nafiu Bala Gombe, that small fry, the inconsequential member of an equally inconsequential ADC, is today the fish bone troubling the throats of political war horses like Atiku Abubakar, David Mark, Rauf Aregbesola, Peter Obi, Nasir el-Rufai, Rotimi Amaechi, Rabiu Kwankwanso and the other political refugees waiting on the sidelines as their fate hangs in the balance of a court judgement. He is the reason sleep has fled these men’s eyelids even as they threaten bile and bitter kolas. It is Bala Gombe’s time in the sun and he is all smiles. He is the reason Bala Mohammed and Seyi Makinde are languishing in the seventh heaven of politics, the purgatory of chieftains caught in the crossroads of indecision. He is the reason the political fathers are wasting scarce foreign currencies on international lobbyists and publicists for reputations that have been soiled worse than the stain of a diarrheic poop on a white bridal gown. 

From relative obscurity and irrelevance, Nafiu Gombe has been catapulted to the apogee of national prominence due to the reckless indifference of men who have grown too fat and power-hungry to play the role of opposition. They were blind to the landmines everyone else could see in their determined effort to short-circuit a political system they were critical to making unworkable. Today, they point accusing fingers at both real and imaginary enemies in the ruling party and an electoral umpire whose chair they rumour has been held hostage, spooked with a shiny gun trained to his head while a pre-signed letter of resignation lies by his side. Fabu agba!!!