ADC Adamawa Ticket: Lawal, Atiku Camp Clash
Barely nine days before official campaigning opens for the January 2027 presidential election, the fault line running through Nigeria’s main opposition platform has widened again, this time over who rightfully owns the African Democratic Congress governorship ticket in Adamawa State.
Former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, reopened the dispute in a Facebook post on Sunday titled “Kachalla Series Three,” alleging that the ADC set aside Engr. Umar Suleiman, whom he said won the party’s Adamawa governorship primary, and forwarded the name of Tukur Moddibo instead. Lawal tied the alleged change to ethnic calculation and to the influence of the party’s presidential candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar.
His language was blunt. Comparing both the Adamawa nomination and the ADC presidential ticket to goods bought off a discount website, he wrote: “As the story goes on the streets in the state, APC donated its gubernatorial candidate to the state having purchased him from TEMU the cheap online market place, and it appears that the ADC too has just done likewise, aside giving to the nation a presidential candidate that looks more like he too was a cheap product from TEMU.”
The numbers behind the quarrel are on the public record. When the ADC held its Adamawa governorship primary in May 2026, results announced across the state’s 21 local government areas showed Omar Suleiman, a former Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority and a onetime Nigerian ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo, polling 143,216 votes. Hamman Tukur Modibbo came second with 56,801 votes, while Umar Suleiman Uba placed third with 20,343. The chairman of the party’s state primary election committee, Dr Nicholas Msheliza, declared Suleiman duly elected. Reports of a possible substitution surfaced weeks later, and the ADC national leadership has not publicly confirmed replacing him.
Lawal argued that the man he described as “very competent and experienced” posed a genuine threat to entrenched interests in the state, and he insisted the alleged switch cannot survive judicial scrutiny. “This criminal substitution which violates the Electoral Act 2026, the ADC Constitution, and the ADC Primary Elections Guidelines will be tested in the courts and it will fail woefully,” he said. He also predicted rejection at the ballot box, adding, “The Adamawa masses trust God that both the ADC and APC will lose the gubernatorial elections in the state,” while noting that voters have other candidates and parties to choose from.
The legal ground he is invoking is itself unsettled. President Bola Tinubu signed the Electoral Act 2026 into law on February 18, 2026, repealing the 2022 Act. The new law abolished the delegate system under Section 84(2), requiring parties to nominate through direct primaries or consensus, and obliges every party under Section 77(2) to file a digital membership register with the Independent National Electoral Commission at least 21 days before any primary, with only listed members eligible to vote or contest. Lawyers challenging similar substitutions elsewhere, notably within the APC, have argued that candidate changes are lawful only in cases of death or voluntary withdrawal, though commentators have also pointed out that section numbering shifted between the 2022 and 2026 statutes, an ambiguity likely to be resolved only in court.
The clock is tight. Under INEC’s revised timetable, primaries ran from April 23 to May 30, 2026, governorship nomination submissions closed on August 8, 2026, campaigns for governorship and state assembly seats begin on September 9, and the final list of governorship candidates is due for publication on October 10, 2026. Presidential and National Assembly elections hold on January 16, 2027, with governorship and state assembly polls following on February 6, 2027.
Lawal’s quarrel with Atiku is not new. He served as SGF from August 27, 2015, until his removal on October 30, 2017, over the contract awarded through the Presidential Initiative for the North East for clearing grass in camps for internally displaced persons. He was arraigned by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission over N544m, and on November 18, 2022, Justice Charles Agbaza of the FCT High Court upheld his no case submission and acquitted him alongside five co defendants, holding that none of the 11 prosecution witnesses established the ingredients of any offence. The EFCC indicated it would appeal.
He left the APC in June 2025 for the ADC coalition, then quit the party on June 1, 2026, days after Atiku emerged its presidential candidate. In the first instalment of the same series, he wrote: “I am exiting the ADC because its just concluded primaries were at all levels massively rigged in favour Kachalla Abubakar Atiku.”
Atiku’s camp has rejected the allegations. In a statement issued by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, the former Vice President’s media office described the position as selective outrage and questioned why the same process was acceptable in Adamawa. “Mr Lawal has also failed to explain how the very same primary process he now dismisses as fraudulent somehow produced a result he appears perfectly willing to accept in Adamawa State, where his cousin, Omar Suleiman, emerged as the ADC governorship candidate,” the statement read. Lawal has not publicly provided documentary evidence for the substitution claim, and the allegations remain contested.
The ADC presidential primary of May 25, 2026 returned Atiku with 1,846,370 votes from 2,527,977 members who participated, out of a registered membership put at 3,113,599. Former Rivers State governor Rotimi Amaechi polled 504,117, while economist Mohammed Hayatu Deen scored 177,120. Both men, like Lawal, questioned aspects of the exercise.
Adamawa’s own electoral history explains why the ticket matters so much. Atiku carried his home state in the 2023 presidential election with 417,611 votes against Tinubu’s 182,881 and Peter Obi’s 105,648, even as he lost nationally with 6,984,520 votes to Tinubu’s 8,794,726. The 2023 governorship race was decided by a margin of about 32,000 votes, with Governor Ahmadu Umaru Fintiri of the PDP polling 430,861 against the APC’s Aishatu Dahiru Binani on 398,788, after a supplementary poll and a rogue declaration by a resident electoral commissioner that INEC voided and the courts later disregarded. Registered voters stood at 2,196,566 with turnout of roughly 40 per cent.
The APC, for its part, has its own contested ticket. Ahmed Tijjani Galadima, a former Executive Secretary of the Petroleum Technology Development Fund, was declared winner of the party’s Adamawa primary on May 22, 2026 with 414,444 votes, ahead of Abdulrazak Namdas with 86,004 and Abdulrahman Haske with about 65,900. Haske queried the collation, saying, “It was surprising that while we were waiting for the collation of the votes to happen; what happened to our greatest surprise was declaration of the winner.”
With litigation threatened on one flank and the final candidate list due in October, Adamawa is heading into the 2027 cycle with both leading parties carrying unresolved internal disputes into a race that was decided by a slim margin the last time out.