Convener of The Alternative, Segun Sowunmi has criticised the coalition drive around the African Democratic Congress (ADC), arguing that the successful coalition template in Nigerian politics was belongs to President Bola Tinubu and former President Muhammadu Buhari and cannot be casually replicated.
Speaking on TVC’s Breakfast programme on Thursday, Sowunmi said the political alliance that produced the All Progressives Congress (APC) was built on years of ideological stability and hard work, qualities he argued are missing in the current ADC-led coalition effort.
“First of all, you must concede that the playbook of a coalition political party belongs to Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Muhammadu Buhari in that bloc. I don’t mean them as individuals, but within their bloc. They brought stability of ideological situations to the table,” Sowunmi said.
He explained that Tinubu and Buhari were able to work together because they had long-standing political identities, noting that Tinubu had always been associated with the AD and AC political tradition, while Buhari remained rooted in the ANPP.
“To that extent, when they wanted to do a coalition, they could imagine themselves to be from the same material, only joining together political numbers,” he added.
Sowunmi faulted current coalition advocates, particularly within the ADC, accusing them of attempting to copy a model they neither understand nor helped to build.
“The challenge with these people now is that those who want to do coalition are a cheap, fake set of humans who do not understand that you have to rewrite the book,” he said.
“You can’t run on the playbook of Bola Tinubu and Buhari, which they invented, and think you’re going to beat them at a game they invented.”
He maintained that coalition-building requires intense grassroots work and political sacrifice, stressing that Tinubu and Buhari did not achieve their alliance overnight.
According to him, both leaders were unable to form a coalition in 2011 and only succeeded later after abandoning their former parties and persuading other politicians to join a new political platform.
“If you watch the people calling coalition now, they don’t want to do the heavy lifting,” Sowunmi said. “The hard work of coalition building is going back to the parties at the base.”
Using the ADC as an example, he argued that the party’s leadership crisis stemmed from attempts to take control from the top without due regard for constitutional processes.
“They hopped onto a party that had existed for some time and tried to grab it at the top, without looking at the constitutional requirements,” he said, adding that the approach had inevitably led to internal crisis.
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