ADC Demands Answers From INEC, Police Over Alleged APC Tilt
Barely a year to the 2027 general elections, the African Democratic Congress, ADC, has thrown a direct challenge at two institutions meant to stand above partisan politics, accusing the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, and the Nigeria Police Force of drifting toward the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.
The party’s grievance, set out on Thursday in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, rests on two developments. The first is a report that a faction of the National Union of Road Transport Workers, NURTW, associated with Musiliu Akinsanya, better known as MC Oluomo, could be engaged by INEC to move election personnel and sensitive materials. The second is the appearance of the Lagos State Commissioner of Police, Tijani Fatai, at the launch of the City Boy Movement, a group backing President Bola Tinubu.
“There are no longer any discernible boundaries between the Nigerian state and the ruling APC,” Abdullahi said, describing the pattern as one in which “partisan actors are being positioned to handle sensitive election materials while heads of state institutions that are required to be neutral are brazenly co-opted into partisan politics.”
To grasp why the claim lands hard, it helps to place the actors. The ADC is the platform adopted in July 2025 by an opposition coalition assembled to unseat President Tinubu, drawing figures such as former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, former Transportation Minister Rotimi Amaechi and former Senate President David Mark, who serves as interim national chairman. INEC, for its part, is barely nine months into the tenure of Prof Joash Amupitan, who was sworn in on October 23, 2025 to replace Prof Mahmood Yakubu after a decade in charge. At his presentation, the President described Amupitan as apolitical.
The reference to MC Oluomo carries its own weight. The transport union figure, now NURTW national president, was at the centre of documented controversy in the 2023 elections, when a video circulated of him warning Lagos residents who would not vote APC to stay at home. Ahead of that year’s governorship poll, a Federal High Court restrained INEC and the Lagos Resident Electoral Commissioner from using him to distribute electoral materials, after civic groups raised fears of intimidation. The 2023 presidential election eventually recorded a turnout of about 27 percent, the lowest since the return to civilian rule in 1999.
Against that history, the ADC argued that handing logistics to actors seen as loyal to one contestant would “erode confidence in the credibility of the polls.” It said it would write to Amupitan to demand a formal explanation of the reported arrangement.
On the police, Abdullahi was equally blunt. “The Nigeria Police Force belongs to the Nigerian people, not to any political party. Senior police officers must not only remain impartial, they must also be seen to be impartial,” he said. The party asked the Inspector General of Police to state whether Fatai’s attendance was authorised, urging discipline if it was not and, if it was, the same latitude for officers invited by rival parties. To press the point, it invited the Inspector General and the Commissioner of Police for the Federal Capital Territory to its coming event in Abuja.
The party tied its anxiety to a recent remark by President Tinubu that “all is fair in war,” which it said had sharpened suspicion around the reported logistics plan.
Neither INEC nor the police had issued a formal response to the specific allegations as of the time of filing, and the reports of the NURTW engagement remain unconfirmed. Still, the intervention signals the tenor of the contest ahead, as an opposition still managing its own leadership disputes moves to frame the neutrality of the umpire and the security services as an early battleground for 2027.