Remember the 59-Person Committee? It Just Started an Actual Family Fight

Okay so remember when the OK Movement, the support group built around Peter Obi and Kwankwaso, announced that 59-member Presidential Campaign Council, and I joked that it wasn't even the "real" party structure? Well, the real party has now formally responded, and it is not going well.

NDC National Leader Senator Seriake Dickson looked at that 59-person council and called it, in his own words, "nonsensical" and "unheard of." Not "premature." Not "needs review." Nonsensical. That's the kind of word you use about a group chat, not a whole political structure.

The NDC's National Chairman, Senator Moses Cleopas, went further and put out an actual statement titled "Re: Purported OK Movement PCC Announcement", which is the political equivalent of your parent replying to your Instagram caption with "this is not what we discussed."

But the OK Movement's Director-General, John Ughulu, was not sending anybody an apology. His response, more or less: we did not build this movement overnight, we have our own national, state, local government and ward structures, and nobody, not the NDC, not anybody, gets to just "declare that structure dissolved, transferred or absorbed" without the movement's say-so. He even added that the movement isn't a "conventional support group," which is the group-project equivalent of saying "I did the work, so I decide how it's graded."

And here's the funniest layer: while all this was happening, some people inside the OK Movement itself were quietly trying to remove Ughulu as DG. The grassroots leaders shut that down too, at their own summit, and voted to keep him. So in the same week, Ughulu survived an internal coup attempt AND told the actual party backing his candidates to back off.

So to summarize: the support group is now bigger than the party wants it to be, immune to its own internal removal attempts, and not taking instructions from anybody. Obi and Kwankwaso haven't said a word. Smart.