Not so ok

Politics, we are told, makes strange bedfellows. Yet the real danger is not

strangeness but incompatibility. Strange bedfellows can surprise you; incompatible

ones suffocate you. What happens when those brought together by ambition refuse

to sleep in the same bed? That is the parable of the National Democratic Congress today.

The NDC wants to be seen as a national redemption song, yet it increasingly sounds like a choir whose lead singers are reading from different hymn sheets.  Its two front men, Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso, are formidable figures in their own right, like two fine wines from different

vineyards, but together they taste of confusion.

On paper, the arrangement is almost irresistible. Obi brings the emotional energy of the East and a substantial national following; Kwankwaso contributes the grassroots reach and political weight of the North. Behind them stands Henry Seriake Dickson, an Ijaw politician whose maternal ancestry reaches into Ijebuland.

In miniature, this is Nigeria: East, North, Niger Delta, Yoruba country; Christian and Muslim; urban technocrat and grassroots mobiliser. It ought to be a political bridge. Instead, the bridge is beginning to resemble a tollgate dispute.

The problem is not simply ideological divergence but philosophical divorce.

Obi insists that fuel subsidy must not return: “to bring it back is to bring back the leprosy.” Kwankwaso counters that subsidy must return, warning: “you cannot remove the roof in the rainy season and ask the tenant to smile.” Obi is comfortable with state police, seeing it as federalism coming of age. Kwankwaso is opposed, fearing governors would become emperors with private armies.

These are not minor policy differences; they are competing visions of governance

itself. As Aristotle reminded us, a constitution is “an arrangement of offices

and a common view of the good life.” What, then, is the NDC’s view of the good

life? Market or mercy? Restructuring or retaining? For now, Nigerians are left

guessing.

What we are witnessing has the makings of a government with split

personality. One head says go left, the other says go right, and the body

politic is asked to walk in both directions at once. It is like trying to drive

a car with two steering wheels. At best you go in circles; at worst you crash

before leaving the compound. Nigerians may forgive a party that faces a tough

choice. They will not forgive a party that insists on two contradictory choices

at the same time.

Then there is the not-so-small matter of integration, the cancer that has

killed more third forces in Nigeria than rigging ever did. Some of the support

groups around Obi and Kwankwaso have persuaded themselves that they are the

sun, moon and rain.

They behave like landlords who forgot they are tenants. The latest evidence is the so-called Presidential Campaign Council announced by the Obi–Kwankwaso (OK) Movement without the authorisation of the NDC. Both Obi and Kwankwaso seemed to have forgotten that the LP before 2022 was little more than a husk inhabited by politicians wracked by an inferiority complex, and the NNPP a one-man tent in Kano.

While they pitched their camps precariously with the ADC, a waiting room for angry men without a bus, Dickson was already a landlord at the NDC headquarters and gave them a house. Now they want to claim the deeds.

The NDC did not spring into existence the morning Obi and Kwankwaso walked

into its secretariat. They joined a platform that already existed and had been

developed under Dickson’s leadership. Contemporary accounts of the party’s

formation and the May 2026 meeting at its Abuja secretariat record that Dickson

was already central to the party’s organisation before the two former governors

moved into it.

Expectedly, the party promptly disowned their 59-man band, as it

should. Dickson, the party’s national leader, called the whole business

“nonsensical,” and he was being charitable.

His point is elementary but profound: mobilisation is not sovereignty. The party is the mother, the support group the child. A child may be louder, more energetic, more popular, but it

cannot claim to own the mother.

Robert Michels, in his iron law of oligarchy, warned that every organisation, no matter how democratic its birth, breeds oligarchs who believe they own it.

Mancur Olson, in his logic of collective action, warned that small, noisy groups will always try to privatise the benefits of a collective enterprise. That is what is happening in the NDC. Everybody seems determined to establish who owns the party, who owns the ticket and who gets to pee highest up the tree.

Hobbes, centuries earlier, warned that “where there are two sovereigns in one commonwealth, there is civil war in perpetual motion.” The NDC does not need Hobbes to remind it; it needs only to listen to itself.

History offers parallels. The First Republic’s NCNC began as a nationalist

coalition but soon collapsed into regional suspicion.

India’s Congress Party at its best was a vast umbrella of socialists, conservatives, minorities and

regional interests, yet it endured because it subordinated difference to a

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larger project.

South Africa’s ANC similarly became powerful not because

everyone thought alike, but because diverse constituencies learned to argue

beneath one umbrella.

Coalitions become national when they transform difference into architecture; they become dysfunctional when they transform difference into ownership. Nigeria’s political history is littered with movements that

began as national projects and ended as personal platforms and fiefdoms.

Even fables echo the danger. Aesop’s tale of the two goats on a narrow

bridge comes to mind: each insists on passing first, neither yields, and both

fall into the river.

Coalitions that refuse compromise risk the same fate. The Yoruba say, ajeji owo kan ko gbe eru d’ori – one hand cannot lift a load to the head alone.

The Igbo echo: igwe bu ike – strength is in multitude. The Hausa add: gaba ɗaya ake cin nasara – victory comes through collective effort.

Even Fulani herdsmen know cattle move faster when they move as one. Yet here we have a coalition of people who ordinarily would not share the same room, now sharing a ticket and quarrelling over who owns the microphone.

That is the paradox and the potential of the NDC. Its promise lies precisely

in its unnaturalness. It brings together constituencies that ordinarily would

not meet: the trader in Onitsha who believes in free enterprise and the talakawa

in Kano who believe in subsidy as social wage; the lawyer in Lagos who wants

state police and the retired general in Kaduna who fears it. That is what a

national party should look like.

In a country as divided as Nigeria, a national party must be a coalition of strangers, like the early ANC in South Africa or the Congress Party in India at its best.

However, that potential requires integration, not proprietorship. A

coalition is not a property. It is a marriage. And as every married man knows,

the marriage does not work because you agree on everything. It works because

you agree on how to disagree.

The All Progressives Congress understood this in 2013. Buhari’s northern constituency and Tinubu’s South-West machine were not natural twins. They even had APGA and some PDP in-between, yet they sat down,

locked the door, argued till dawn, and emerged with one manifesto, one position, and one voice. That, ordinarily, should be the assignment before the NDC now. One voice does not mean one personality; it means one agreed position.

Plato, like the Scriptures, warned that a city or house divided against itself cannot stand, because the soul of the city or house mirrors the soul of its rulers.

Nigeria has had enough journeys without destinations. It cannot afford

another automobile steered by two men with different maps.

The danger is no longer merely that Obi and Kwankwaso may disagree. The

greater danger is that their followers may begin to believe that disagreement

is betrayal or ethnic-based.

That is how coalitions die: every concession becomes evidence of weakness, every rival becomes an enemy, every institutional boundary becomes an insult. Soon the movement spends more energy fighting itself than confronting the problems it was created to solve. Nigeria has seen

that movie before. It rarely has a happy ending.

The OK Movement therefore stands at an intriguing crossroads. Its very awkwardness is its greatest promise – and potentially its undoing.

Arithmetic is not alchemy; putting different ingredients in one pot does not automatically

produce a national meal. Somebody still has to cook. The principals must cook.

The party must cook. The support groups must stop fighting over the kitchen.

And the Nigerian voter must eventually be told, plainly and without political

poetry, what is actually going to be served.

For me, strange bedfellows can win elections. But only if they agree to

sleep in the same bed. And before they invite Nigerians into the house, they

must demonstrate that they have agreed on who owns the house, who holds the

keys, and, most importantly, what kind of home they intend to build.

Otherwise, the movement whose initials promise that Nigeria will be “OK” may

discover that the first thing requiring urgent repair is itself.