August 26, 2026
It is not quite clear if the ruling All Progressives Congress party has indeed withdrawn the membership list of its Presidential Campaign Council for the January 16, 2027 elections. What is not in doubt is that the list has run into a storm of criticism in which certain members of the opposition parties have taken the lead. There is a lot to quarrel with in that bloated, unworkable list in which every APC official wants to be, or is made, a member. Not the least of this is the inclusion of one or two public office holders, like Dr. Zacchaeus Adedeji, the chair of the Nigerian Revenue Service. His position, it could be argued, ought to place him above partisan politics. Many people would view him as a technocrat who should be accountable to all Nigerians irrespective of their political affiliation. But that is as far as it goes. Otherwise, he is not your everyday civil servant who, theoretically, is supposed to serve any government in power without consideration for its political connections.
Which is to say that he is, in a sense, a political appointee who would be expected to defend the interests and ensure the survival of the government in which he serves. It would be naïve to think that his appointment to the fund-raising committee of the campaign automatically means he would turn Nigeria’s revenue purse over to the APC. It would take an extraordinary level of administrative insouciance and lack of oversight, as was witnessed under the Muhammadu Buhari-led APC administration, when then CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele, flung aside all caution and threw his hat into the politics of that time, for this to happen. If Zacchaeus Adedeji could hand over Nigeria’s revenue till to the APC simply on account of his appointment to the fund-raising committee, it means he could very well do it without the appointment.
