Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Read what happened in Nigeria on 1st April 2026. Then read it again. Then ask yourself whether what you are reading is the conduct of a government that governs, or the conduct of a government that is afraid.
The Independent National Electoral Commission, the body charged by the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria with the duty of conducting free, fair, and credible elections, removed a legitimately ratified party leadership from its portal. It froze the activities of the only viable national opposition coalition ahead of the 2027 presidential election. It did this on April Fool’s Day. The date is fitting. Because what INEC did on 1st April 2026 is the most transparently foolish act of institutionalised partisanship in the history of Nigerian electoral administration, and the Nigerian people are not fooled.
But there is nothing funny about what is happening. What is happening is the systematic murder of democracy. And The Narrative Force will name it, document it, and prosecute it in every public forum available until the architects of this ambush are held to account.
The INEC Chairman Has Now Threatened the Opposition Openly
On 3rd April 2026, Professor Joash Amupitan, Chairman of INEC, appeared on Arise News and issued a direct threat to the ADC. He warned that if Senator David Mark proceeded with the party’s scheduled congresses beginning 9th April and its national convention on 14th April, the result would be what happened in Zamfara. He said: “If they decide to go ahead, let me tell you what happened in Zamfara: it happened in the past.”
Let every Nigerian understand what this means.
The INEC Chairman has explicitly threatened to invalidate the electoral results of the most important opposition party in Nigeria if it proceeds with its constitutionally mandated internal activities. He has threatened to deploy the Zamfara precedent, in which an entire state’s election results were annulled because of a party’s internal congress disputes, against the ADC. He has threatened, from the platform of the supposedly neutral electoral umpire, to punish a political party for exercising its democratic rights.
This is not a regulator speaking. This is an instrument of the ruling party speaking. Senator David Mark was correct when he addressed the nation at the Musa Yar’adua Centre in Abuja and declared that INEC under Professor Joash Amupitan has taken sides, can no longer be trusted, and has acted in contempt of the Court of Appeal by inventing a status quo that has never existed in Nigerian law.
The electoral umpire has taken off its mask.
The Electoral Act 2026 Expressly Forbids What INEC Has Done
This is not merely a matter of political argument. It is a matter of statutory law that the INEC Chairman is bound by oath to uphold.
Section 83(5) of the Electoral Act 2026 expressly states that no court in Nigeria shall entertain jurisdiction over any suit or matter pertaining to the internal affairs of a political party. Section 83(6) of the same Act prohibits any court from granting interim or interlocutory injunctions in such matters.
These provisions are not ambiguous. They are not open to interpretation. The National Assembly of the Federal Republic of Nigeria enacted them precisely to prevent what is happening to the ADC right now. The legislature, exercising its constitutional authority, drew a clear line: the internal affairs of a political party belong to that party. No court crosses that line. No injunction freezes that space.
The Federal High Court in Abuja is hearing a suit that Section 83(5) of the Electoral Act 2026 expressly says it has no jurisdiction to hear. The court should not be hearing it. It was never supposed to hear it. And INEC, which is obliged to know the laws it administers, is using a court order that should never have been made as the justification for an action the law expressly forbids.
The ADC’s legal team must press this argument at the Federal High Court without delay. Section 83(5) and Section 83(6) of the Electoral Act 2026 are the most powerful weapons available. They do not require constitutional interpretation. They require only that the court read the statute it is operating under. The suit must be struck out for want of jurisdiction. That argument, pressed with full force alongside the forum domesticum principle and the status quo ante ante argument anchored in the NEC decision of 29th July 2025, forms a complete and devastating legal case.
Nyesom Wike Has Revealed Himself
On 3rd April 2026, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory Nyesom Wike appeared before journalists in Abuja and said that INEC should have recognised Nafiu Bala Gombe as the ADC National Chairman. He said the ADC should be “happy” that INEC did not recognise any faction.
Read that again.
A serving minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, a member of the Tinubu cabinet, a man occupying the most powerful administrative position in the Federal Capital Territory where INEC is headquartered, publicly stated his preference for which faction of an opposition party INEC should recognise. He weighed in on an internal opposition dispute on the side of the plaintiff. He did so from a government platform, in front of cameras, without embarrassment.
This is the smoking gun that was not supposed to appear in public. A cabinet minister, three years from a presidential election, has publicly aligned himself with the litigation that is being used to destroy the ADC. He has placed himself in the frame. And the questions that The Narrative Force has consistently demanded must now be re-asked with his statement as fresh evidence.
Who initiated contact with Gombe? Who funded this litigation? What was promised in return?
Nyesom Wike does not speak for himself on matters of political strategy. He speaks for the government he serves. His statement on 3rd April 2026 is now part of the public record of this ambush, and it must be treated as such by every journalist, every lawyer, and every Nigerian voter who is watching what is being done to their democracy.
The Status Quo That Never Existed
INEC has invented a status quo that has no basis in Nigerian law, in the English language, or in common sense.
The status quo ante bellum, in every legal tradition that has ever used the phrase, means the state of affairs before the conflict began. The conflict, meaning the litigation, began on 2nd September 2025 when Gombe filed his suit. The state of affairs before that date was unambiguous and documented: Senator David Mark was the ratified National Chairman of the ADC, confirmed by a sovereign NEC decision of 29th July 2025, with 36 state executives and a complete national party architecture in place.
INEC did not upload that leadership onto its portal until 9th September 2025, seven days after the suit was filed, because INEC sat on the formal notification it received on 29th July for 34 days without processing it. INEC then used the gap created by its own administrative negligence, or deliberate delay, as the justification for removing a leadership that had existed in political and legal fact since five weeks before the suit was filed.
Senator David Mark stated it precisely at the Musa Yar’adua Centre press conference: “That decision was taken on July 29th, not on September 9th. INEC has invented a status quo that never existed, because there was no time that the African Democratic Congress did not have a duly constituted leadership.”
He is correct. And the Inter-Party Advisory Council confirmed it when IPAC publicly stated on 2nd April 2026 that the removal of David Mark and Aregbesola from INEC’s portal appears premature and capable of creating avoidable instability, and that it may set a troubling precedent that undermines confidence in the neutrality of the electoral umpire.
When IPAC, which represents every registered political party in Nigeria, describes INEC’s action in these terms, INEC can no longer claim the cover of institutional neutrality. That cover has been stripped.
The Economic Record They Are Hiding From
There is a reason this government is prepared to do all of this. There is a reason INEC is removing party leaders from portals, a reason a cabinet minister is publicly intervening in opposition disputes, a reason a funded litigant was deployed to freeze the ADC’s internal activities at the precise moment the opposition coalition was reaching critical mass.
The reason is the record.
As of 3rd April 2026, the naira stands at 1,378 to the dollar in the official market and 1,410 in the parallel market. It stood at 460 to the dollar on inauguration day. The naira has lost more than 200 per cent of its value in less than three years. Petrol now costs between 1,270 and 1,470 naira per litre. It cost under 200 naira per litre before Tinubu removed the fuel subsidy on the day he was sworn in.
According to the World Bank, 129 million Nigerians now live in poverty. The United Nations World Food Programme has projected that 35 million Nigerians will face severe hunger in 2026. Borno State has been classified at Phase 5, the famine-level classification, the same applied to parts of Gaza and Sudan. The WFP suspended 150 nutrition clinics in 2025 due to funding shortfalls, placing 300,000 children at risk of severe acute malnutrition.
Foreign direct investment fell 70 per cent in the first quarter of 2025. At the Tokyo International Conference on African Development, Nigeria’s promotional booth was empty. The president who has made 46 foreign trips at a cumulative cost exceeding 36 billion naira in 2024 alone could not arrange for his country to be represented in a room where African nations compete for investment.
This is the record that cannot be defended on its merits. So it must be protected by destroying the platform from which it can be challenged.
The Killing That Continues
While this political assault on the ADC occupies the national conversation, Nigerians are still dying. The Lancet published in June 2025 a classification of violence-related deaths in Nigeria as a public health crisis. Between January and March 2025 alone, 1,420 people were killed and 537 kidnapped, more than 15 deaths per day in a single quarter. Nigeria’s own military conducted two confirmed airstrikes that killed civilians in the wrong locations. Over 1.3 million people have been internally displaced. Borno State is approaching famine conditions.
And on 3rd April 2026, the First Lady launched a Community Food Bank Scheme to address child malnutrition. A food bank scheme. For the children of a country that produces oil, that has the largest economy in Africa, whose president has spent 192 days abroad since inauguration.
This government launches food banks for children it has pushed into hunger through its own policies, while simultaneously destroying the only political platform through which its governance record can be challenged at the ballot box in 2027.
The audacity is boundless. The suffering is real. And the reckoning is coming.
What Must Happen Now
The ADC must proceed with its congresses beginning 9th April and its national convention on 14th April as scheduled. The law is on the party’s side. The notice has been given. INEC has acknowledged receipt. Let INEC attempt to explain to the Nigerian public, and to the international community watching, on what legal basis a constitutionally registered political party is prohibited from holding its internal meetings.
The legal team must file immediately at the Federal High Court arguing that by virtue of Section 83(5) and Section 83(6) of the Electoral Act 2026, the court has no jurisdiction to entertain this suit. That argument, if properly made, should end the litigation entirely. The suit should never have been accepted.
Every Nigerian journalist with access to Nyesom Wike must ask him today: in what capacity did he express a preference for which faction of an opposition party INEC should recognise? Who asked him to make that statement? What communications has he had with either Gombe’s legal team or the APC leadership regarding the ADC dispute?
Every member of the public record: document the INEC Chairman’s Zamfara threat of 3rd April 2026. It is a statement made on national television by a supposedly neutral regulator, threatening a registered political party with electoral annihilation if it exercises its democratic rights. It must be preserved, reported, and placed before every international election observer body that will monitor the 2027 process.
A Final Word to the Nigerian People
You are watching an election being stolen before it is held.
Not on polling day. Not by ballot box snatching. Not by thugs at collation centres. This theft is being conducted in courtrooms, on INEC’s portal, from the mouths of cabinet ministers at press conferences, and through the financial resources of sponsors whose identities have not yet been established but whose footprints are everywhere.
The ADC is not the victim of an internal party dispute. The ADC is the victim of a coordinated state-sponsored ambush, designed to ensure that when Nigerians go to the polls in 2027, the most credible opposition platform has been reduced to rubble.
But rubble can be rebuilt. A coalition cannot be killed by a court order. An arithmetic truth cannot be erased from a portal. The 2023 votes that exceeded Tinubu’s total still exist in the memory of every Nigerian who cast them. The suffering that has accumulated since inauguration day exists in the daily life of every Nigerian who buys food, pays transport fares, and watches their currency evaporate.
The architects of this ambush have calculated that demoralisation will do what litigation cannot. That if they freeze the structure, the spirit will follow.
They have miscalculated.
The spirit of this coalition is not housed in a portal entry at INEC. It is housed in the convictions of millions of Nigerians who know what they have lived through since 29th May 2023 and who know precisely what they intend to do about it in 2027.
Hold the ward. Press the law. Document everything. And do not give them the demoralisation they have designed this entire operation to produce.
The ambush has failed.
The ADC stands.
Nigeria will decide.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
