OPINION: David Emmanuel Ombugadu And The Many Faces of Politics

By Eric M Kuju

Politics is unfair. Politics is dirty. Politics is immoral. Politics is brutal. And yet, politics is interesting. Nowhere is this paradox more vividly illustrated than in the recent political somersault of Hon. David Emmanuel Ombugadu, the twice-defeated but ever-resilient gubernatorial candidate of the People's Democratic Party (PDP) in Nasarawa State.

Ombugadu has formally resigned from the PDP and has now formally joined the APC. For those who have followed Nasarawa politics closely, this may read as just another line in the long script of Nigerian political theatre. But for thousands of ordinary supporters, people who protested in the streets, who shed blood, who stripped themselves bare in acts of desperate solidarity after what they believed was a stolen mandate in 2023, this news lands like a thunderclap.

I was in a gathering not long ago where PDP stakeholders in Lafia Local Government Area took turns to speak passionately about Ombugadu's 2027 candidature. Elderly men were imploring him to run, pledging undying loyalty. These were politicians, yes, and one might dismiss their enthusiasm as the theatre of patronage. But what cannot be dismissed so easily are the conversations I had with everyday people – men and women with little political exposure but immense emotional investment – who believed absolutely that the PDP in Nasarawa State 'belonged' to Ombugadu. "Why would he leave his own party?" they asked. The question felt almost rhetorical. It no longer is.

What stings most is the hypocrisy the moment demands; not Ombugadu's alone, but the hypocrisy politics itself extracts from its players. When the late Distinguished Senator Solomon Ewuga made the same journey from PDP to APC, Ombugadu's supporters were ferocious in their condemnation. They called him a traitor. They used language I will not reproduce here. They were relentless. Now, Ombugadu (the very man they were defending) has made the identical move. One is left to wonder: will they find the same energy for him that they found for Ewuga? Or will loyalty, as it so often does in Nigerian politics, bend itself around power rather than principle?

His resignation letter is a small masterpiece of political euphemism. Ombugadu cites "party conflicts and leadership tussles" as the reason for his departure. These are the very conflicts that many observers argue he helped engineer. It was, after all, his loyalists who dominated the 2024 PDP congresses, reportedly buying up nomination forms to consolidate control and shutting out heavyweights like Senators Suleiman Adokwe and Mohammed Ogoshi Onawo. He built the fortress and now complains of the walls closing in. 

The FCT Minister Nyesom Wike, his close political ally, has been widely accused of similar architectural destruction at the national level. What the master does to the national structure, the apprentice has done to the state chapter.

Rumours are already filling the vacuum. Whispers suggest Ombugadu is positioning for the Nasarawa North Senatorial seat left vacant by the passing of Senator Godiya Akwashiki, under the APC platform. Others speak of a "gentleman's agreement" with Governor Abdullahi Sule on a 2027 succession arrangement. In Nigerian politics, such arrangements are not impossible. Indeed, they are often the invisible grammar of public events. But they require us to ask a harder question: what is the cost of such manoeuvres to democratic culture?

The cost, I submit, is paid not by the politicians but by the people. By the woman who bared herself in protest and can hardly explain now what she was fighting for. By the young man who took a baton across his back because he believed in a mandate. By the young man who nearly lost his eye because an overzealous policeman allegedly shot a teargas cannister directly at his face. By the first-time voter who chose civic participation because a particular candidate made politics feel personal and worth fighting for. These people were not playing chess. They were playing with their lives, their dignity, their hope. And they have now received, without warning, an advanced education in what politics actually is.

Perhaps that is not entirely without value. Democracy, wherever it has taken root, has been nourished partly by disillusionment; by citizens learning, through hard experience, that politicians are not messiahs, that parties are vehicles not temples, and that the mandate belongs to the people, not to any individual who claims to be its custodian. If Ombugadu's exit teaches his most passionate supporters to invest their civic energy in institutions rather than personalities, then the lesson, however painful, will have been worth something.

But for now, a reckoning is underway. Many have gotten the most brutal crash course of their lives in the many faces of politics; ambition, calculation, survival, and disappointment. This is not unique to Nasarawa. This is Nigeria. This is politics everywhere. The only question is whether, having seen these faces clearly, the people will look away or look harder.