The judgment of Justice Peter Lifu on Thursday, 5 November 2026, which sacked the David Mark-led leadership of the African Democratic Congress and nullified all its actions, including the nomination of Atiku Abubakar as its presidential candidate for the 16 January 2027 election, was not just a legal defeat. It was an indictment of Atiku himself. After more than three decades of seeking the presidency, after contesting under PDP, ACN, APC and PDP again, Atiku has finally proved what his critics have always said: he wants the office, but he has never wanted to build the vehicle to carry him there. He entered the ADC without thorough investigation, without due consultation, and without the vision to own his own party, and he has now paid the price in full public view, barely 24 hours after his Sokoto rally.
The facts of the trap were in plain sight, if only Atiku had bothered to look. The suit, FHC/ABJ/CS/1819/2025, was filed by Nafiu Bala Gombe, the former National Deputy Chairman (North-East) of the ADC, who argued that after the resignation of the long-serving National Chairman, Ralph Nwosu, he was constitutionally entitled to succeed him. Justice Lifu upheld that claim, holding that the emergence of Mark as National Chairman and Rauf Aregbesola as National Secretary at the 99th NEC meeting of 27 July 2025 violated the ADC constitution, the Electoral Act and the 1999 Constitution, and ordered INEC not to recognise any decision taken at that meeting. The court consequently annulled everything done since that date, including the convention and presidential primary that produced Atiku. The ADC now says it will appeal, citing an earlier judgment of Justice Musa Liman on 2 July 2026 which had affirmed the Mark leadership, but that contradiction itself proves the point: Atiku built his 2027 ambition on a foundation that was already in court, already disputed, and already split into two judgments of coordinate jurisdiction. A serious presidential aspirant does due diligence on the party he is buying into. Atiku did not. He assumed money, crowd and coalition noise would cure a constitutional defect. They did not.
That failure is even more damning when set against the history of the very men Atiku wants to replace. Visionary politicians in Nigeria do not rent parties, they found them. Bola Tinubu did not hijack a dying party in the night, he built the Action Congress, later Action Congress of Nigeria, from Lagos outward, nurtured it, funded its structures, suffered its defeats, and used it as a disciplined platform to negotiate the APC merger from a position of ownership. Muhammadu Buhari did not shop for a ready-made ticket, he single-handedly established the Congress for Progressive Change in 2009 after breaking with the ANPP, built it around his own cult following in the North, and carried it into the 2015 merger as an owner, not a tenant. Today, Peter Obi has done the same with the Nigeria Democratic Congress, NDC, creating his own home rather than begging for shelter in another man’s house. These men understood a simple truth Atiku has refused to learn in 35 years: in Nigerian politics, he who does not own the party does not own his candidacy. Atiku has always wanted to be a tenant-president, moving from PDP to ACN to APC to PDP to ADC, renting structures built by others, and then crying foul when the landlord locks the door.
The ADC fiasco was therefore predictable, and it exposes a deeper lack of vision. A man who has wanted to be president since 1993 should by now have a party that bears his imprint, his ideology, his ward structures, his governors, his legislators, and his succession plan. Atiku has none of these. What he has is a Rolodex of defectors, a coalition of the disgruntled, and a belief that his name alone is enough. He took over ADC without consulting its original owners, without settling the Nwosu-Gombe succession, without regularising Mark’s caretaker committee through a proper, constitutionally compliant convention, and without asking the elementary question any lawyer would ask: who legally owns this party? He rushed to a primary, picked Rotimi Amaechi as running mate, printed ADC caps, and launched a campaign, while the case that would kill it was already pending in Abuja. That is not strategy, it is ignorance dressed as urgency. And now, with the election just two months away, the ADC is left with no valid candidates from presidency to state assembly, according to the plaintiff’s lawyers, and Atiku is left vowing to appeal while campaigning in Kebbi on a ticket the court says does not exist.
Atiku will blame the APC, as he already has, and his supporters will blame Justice Lifu and the judiciary. But the APC did not write the ADC constitution, the APC did not convene the illegal 99th NEC, and the APC did not force Atiku to choose a party he did not investigate. The trap was set by ADC’s own internal contradictions, and Atiku walked into it with his eyes open to ambition and shut to law. Tinubu built ACN, Buhari built CPC, Obi is building NDC, and Atiku, after decades of ambition, is still looking for a party to borrow. Until he learns that a president must first be a party-builder, not a party-hijacker, every judgment will find him where this one found him: standing outside the house he thought he owned, holding a ticket that was never legally his.
