The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has accused President Bola Tinubu of attempting to use recent appointments to placate Northern Nigerians after allegedly sidelining the region for over two years in office.
In a statement issued on Saturday and signed by the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the ADC described the appointments as “too little, too late”, stressing that President Tinubu’s gesture was nothing more than “a desperate, cynical attempt to buy back the trust that he has spent over a year squandering.”
The statement read in part, “You cannot marginalise a region for over twenty-five months and expect applause because you suddenly remembered on the twenty-sixth month that Nigeria is bigger than Lagos State. These so-called appointments are nothing more than political panic management.”
According to the ADC, the President’s new list of appointments came only after mounting discontent from Northern Nigeria and the steady rise of an opposition coalition gaining ground across the region and the country at large.
“For over a year, this government turned a blind eye as bandits terrorised Northern communities, farmers abandoned their lands, and rural economies collapsed under the weight of a poorly executed fuel subsidy removal,” the party said.
The ADC further accused Tinubu of practising “presidential arrogance and unprecedented nepotism”, arguing that most major decisions taken by the administration had excluded Northern stakeholders.
The party noted that Nigerians in the North were fully aware of the political undertones behind the President’s sudden interest in balancing appointments.
“Northerners as co-owners of our great federal republic know better than to be deceived by these token appointments. They see through President Tinubu’s actions and can sense that this is not genuine. Tokenism is not inclusion, and symbolism is not governance,” Abdullahi stated.
The ADC urged the President to abandon what it described as “Bourdillon-style appeasement politics” and instead embrace genuine national inclusion through policy fairness and broad-based consultation.
“You cannot patch a broken roof with press releases and photo-ops. And you certainly cannot restore the trust that you have lost with the public by pretending that titles are a substitute for genuine commitment to nation-building,” the party concluded.
