By Shola Oke
Former Anambra State Governor and 2023 presidential candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, has abandoned plans to join the Action Peoples Party and is now making final preparations to pitch his tent with the African Democratic Congress, according to highly placed sources within his political circle.
The dramatic last minute change of platform represents the first major casualty of the mounting legal challenges surrounding APP’s deregistered status and comes as a devastating blow to the party which had been banking heavily on Obi’s enormous popularity in the Southeast to drive its brand and attract quality candidates ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Sources close to Obi, Diaspora Digital Media understand, revealed that the former presidential candidate, who has been conducting extensive consultations about the most viable platform for his widely anticipated second run at the presidency, became increasingly uncomfortable with APP’s legal predicament following the comprehensive exposé by the Civic Action for Democracy which documented the party’s questionable registration status and INEC’s inability to substantiate its continued recognition despite lawful deregistration in February 2020.
The development is expected to be formally announced within the coming weeks, with Obi likely to unveil his ADC membership alongside key political associates who have been part of his political journey since his departure from the Peoples Democratic Party and subsequent stint with the Labour Party in 2023.
“Mr. Obi is a meticulous person who does not leave anything to chance, especially when it comes to legal and constitutional matters,” one source familiar with the negotiations disclosed. “When the APP leadership approached him about joining their platform, he was initially interested because of the party’s growing presence in the Southeast and the caliber of politicians expressing interest.
However, once the CAD exposé came out with documentary evidence that APP was deregistered in 2020 and has been operating under false pretenses based on a non-existent court order, his team immediately launched an independent investigation to verify these claims.
What they found was deeply troubling: INEC’s records confirm the deregistration, the Supreme Court affirmed INEC’s powers in 2022, and nobody can produce the court order that supposedly protected APP. For someone like Peter Obi who has built his political brand on integrity, due process, and respect for constitutional order, joining a party with such fundamental legal defects was simply not an option.”
The loss of Peter Obi represents a catastrophic setback for APP’s ambitions and has triggered what sources describe as a mass exodus of politicians in Imo State and across the Southeast who had been positioning themselves to join the party in January 2026.
According to political observers in the region, APP’s leadership had been aggressively courting aspirants for various positions including gubernatorial, senatorial, House of Representatives, and State House of Assembly seats, promising them a “fresh platform untainted by the corruption and internal crises plaguing older parties” and leveraging the anticipated boost from Peter Obi’s membership to attract quality candidates.
“The plan was to announce Obi’s membership in January alongside a roster of credible politicians who would give APP immediate legitimacy and electoral viability across the Southeast,” a source within APP’s Southeast coordination team revealed.
“We had commitments from several high profile individuals who were waiting for Obi’s formal declaration before making their own announcements.
“His decision to go with ADC instead has completely upended our strategy. People are now calling to say they’re reconsidering, asking questions about our legal status, and demanding clarity about the deregistration issue before they invest any more time or money in APP.”
The timing of Obi’s decision and the subsequent panic within APP’s ranks directly correlates with the escalating legal scrutiny the party has faced since CAD’s December 12, 2024 world press conference. At that event, CAD’s Executive Director Mazi Franklin Ngoforo presented exhaustive documentation establishing that APP was among 74 political parties deregistered by INEC on February 6, 2020, for failing to meet constitutional requirements under Section 225 of the 1999 Constitution and Section 78 of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended).
The deregistration exercise, which targeted parties that had won no seats in the National Assembly, State Houses of Assembly, or Local Government Councils and had failed to secure minimum vote thresholds in the 2019 general elections, was specifically designed to eliminate non-viable parties cluttering Nigeria’s political landscape.
APP, having demonstrated no electoral viability whatsoever in 2019, clearly met the criteria for deregistration and was duly included on INEC’s published list of 74 parties being removed from the register.
What transformed APP’s deregistration from administrative routine to elaborate fraud was INEC’s inexplicable claim that the party had obtained an interim court order restraining the commission from proceeding with the delisting.
This assertion, which INEC used to exempt APP from the February 2020 deregistration while the other 73 parties were removed, has never been substantiated with any documentary evidence despite numerous requests over nearly six years. The smoking gun in CAD’s exposé was a letter dated July 29, 2020, from Barr. Mrs. Eunice Atuejide, former National Chairman of the National Interest Party (one of the legitimately deregistered parties), to INEC requesting specific details about APP’s supposed court protection.
Mrs. Atuejide asked for the suit number, the name of the court that issued the order, the date of the order, and copies of relevant court processes: basic information that any transparent institution should readily provide. INEC’s response has been five years of complete silence, strongly suggesting that the court order never existed and that APP’s exemption was based on fabrication rather than judicial restraint.
This legal impossibility was compounded when the Supreme Court, in March 2022, comprehensively affirmed INEC’s constitutional powers to deregister parties that fail to meet statutory requirements, effectively validating the 2020 exercise and sealing the fate of all 74 parties including APP.
The legal complications deepened with the passage of the Electoral Act 2022, which retained and reinforced deregistration provisions in Section 94, stipulating that parties failing to win at least one seat in the National Assembly or State House of Assembly, or failing to secure at least 25% of votes in one state in a presidential election, or failing to win at least one chairmanship or councillorship in area council or local government elections, shall be deregistered by INEC within 30 days of final results announcement.
APP’s desperate attempt to cure its legal defects through the October 2024 Jigawa maneuver (where party operatives allegedly arranged to be ceded a councillorship seat in Buntusu Ward, Gwiwa Local Government Area) cannot retroactively legitimize a party that ceased to exist in 2020.
Legal experts have pointed out that APP’s fundamental problem is not merely failing recent electoral requirements but operating for six years after lawful deregistration, participating in elections during this period without legal capacity, and collecting fees from aspirants for nomination forms to contest positions on a platform that doesn’t legally exist. These actions potentially constitute criminal fraud rather than mere electoral irregularities.
For Peter Obi, whose political calculation involves not just winning elections but maintaining the moral authority that has made him a phenomenon in Nigerian politics, association with APP’s legal quagmire would have been reputationally catastrophic.
“Obi’s brand is built on ‘doing things the right way,’ on respect for law and due process, on transparency and accountability,” a political analyst observed. “Imagine the cognitive dissonance if he joined a party that exists only because INEC fabricated a non-existent court order to protect it from lawful deregistration.
His opponents would have had a field day, and his supporters would have been demoralized.”
ADC, registered by INEC and having participated in multiple election cycles including fielding a presidential candidate in 2023, presents none of the existential legal challenges that now plague APP and make it an uninsurable political risk for serious candidates.
The ripple effects of Obi’s decision are already reverberating throughout the Southeast political landscape, with politicians who had tentatively committed to APP now frantically seeking alternative platforms. In Imo State particularly, where gubernatorial aspirant Mazi Chima Amadi and House of Representatives member Hon. Ikenga Imo Ugochinyere have publicly declared for APP and encouraged others to join, the panic is reportedly acute.
“People are asking why they should commit to APP when Peter Obi, who has better researchers and legal advisers than most of us, investigated the party and decided it was too risky,” an Imo State politician who had been considering APP revealed. “They’re also pointing out that Ugochinyere himself didn’t trust APP enough to contest on it in 2023 when his own seat was at stake: he ran on PDP and only came back to APP after winning. If the party’s own promoter and a presidential candidate as sophisticated as Obi won’t risk their futures on this platform, why should we?”
Sources indicate that several senatorial and House of Representatives aspirants who had made preliminary financial commitments to APP are now demanding refunds and exploring options in PDP, APC, Labour Party, and now potentially ADC given Obi’s impending membership.
APP’s leadership has reportedly been in crisis management mode since learning of Obi’s decision, with emergency meetings convened to strategize how to contain the damage and prevent complete organizational collapse before 2027.
However, the party faces an insurmountable credibility problem: it cannot address the fundamental questions about its legal status because doing so requires producing documentation that doesn’t exist or admitting that its continued operation is based on fraud.
The party cannot reassure aspirants about its viability without confronting INEC’s records showing it was deregistered, the Supreme Court judgment affirming that deregistration, and the Electoral Act 2022 provisions that reinforce deregistration requirements.