Parties of Coercion?: How APC, PDP earned Canada’s terrorist label

•President Bola Tinubu now stands at a crossroads

By Olufemi Aduwo

The recent ruling of the Canadian Federal Court, upheld by Justice Phuong Ngo, categorising Nigeria’s ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as a political party whose conduct mirrors the intimidation, coercion and fear-mongering associated with proscribed groups, is a sobering moment in the country’s political history.

While the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was mentioned in the same breath, the court’s emphasis fell squarely on the APC, identifying a sustained pattern of behaviour that undermines democracy through organised violence and calculated terror.

This was not the language of hyperbole but of judicial fact-finding, rooted in evidence, names and dates examined against Canada law’s broad conception of terrorism, which extends beyond bombs and assassinations to any deliberate strategy that subverts democratic governance through fear.

The court’s test was clear. Under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, terrorism includes orchestrated acts that intimidate the public, destabilise institutions or coerce political outcomes. By this measure, association with such an entity even absent personal involvement in violence can make a person inadmissible to Canada.

Case

The case in question involved Douglas Egharevba, who had ties to both PDP and APC.

Yet the court drew a stark qualitative distinction: while PDP’s worst offences were largely historical, APC’s abuses were recent, systematic and ongoing, marking it as the greater threat to democratic norms in our country.

This is not an abstract finding.

It connects directly to specific episodes that reveal how deeply violence and intimidation have been woven into APC’s political machinery.

In 2014, at the height of Boko Haram’s bloody insurgency, a group of Northern governors many of whom had then aligned with or soon to join the APC, travelled to Washington to meet with U.S. State Department officials.

At a time when the Islamist group was bombing markets, kidnapping schoolgirls and overrunning military bases, these politicians deliberately sought to convince the United States authorities that Boko Haram was not an insurgent organisation, with the calculated aim of having the United States remove its terrorism tag on the group.

The motive was as cynical as it was transparent, to undermine the Jonathan administration’s efforts to secure and maintain an official United States Foreign Terrorist Organisation designation for Boko Haram, a status that could have unlocked advanced military aid.

This was not mere political rivalry, it was an act of sabotage with consequences measured in lives lost and territory ceded.

Boko Haram financiers

Five years later, the United Arab Emirates provided President Buhari’s government with a list of individuals convicted in its courts for financing Boko Haram, alongside intelligence naming thirty-two additional financiers, many alleged to be connected to Nigeria’s political and business elite.

The UAE convictions were specific, Surajo Abubakar Muhammad and Saleh Yusuf Adamu received life sentences, while Ibrahim Ali Alhassan, AbdurRahman Ado Musa, Bashir Ali Yusuf and Muhammad Ibrahim Isa were sentenced to ten years each in 2021 for transferring hundreds of thousands of dollars to the insurgent group between 2015 and 2016.

Despite the Nigeria and UAE Mutual Legal Assistance Agreement, the Buhari administration took no visible action on this intelligence.

No arrests, no public prosecutions and no judicial inquiry. The silence was deafening and telling.

Record

The APC’s record on political violence within Nigeria’s borders has been equally corrosive.

On 3 April 2015, six days after the presidential election and before the gubernatorial poll, Alhaji Mikaila Abdullahi, the Resident Electoral Commissioner for Kano State, died in a suspicious fire at his home alongside his wife and two daughters.

Officially attributed to an electrical fault, the blaze occurred immediately after a tense election, eliminating a potentially key witness in any scrutiny of the vote.

The case, like so many involving politically sensitive deaths, was left to wither without transparent investigation.

Four years later, on 18 November 2019, Kogi State’s political climate descended into horror.

Just two days after the gubernatorial election, Mrs Salome Acheju Abuh, the PDP Women Leader in Ochadamu Ward, Ofu Local Government Area, was burnt alive in her own home.

Eyewitnesses reported that political thugs surrounded the house, doused it in petrol, set it alight and fired guns to prevent her escape.

Her screams were heard until the roof collapsed.

Despite public outrage, no senior political figure faced justice.

The brazenness of the attack was not incidental, it also reflected a climate where electoral violence is not only tolerated but weaponised.

Kogi’s then-Governor Yahaya Bello appeared to have embodied this normalisation of intimidation with his notorious “ta-ta-ta-ta” campaign chant an onomatopoeic mimicry of automatic gunfire, deployed with a grin to rile supporters.

The United States took notice, imposing visa restrictions on Bello in 2020 for undermining democratic processes and inciting violence during the 2019 elections.

That a sitting Nigerian governor could be sanctioned abroad for electoral misconduct says as much about the failings of domestic accountability as it does about foreign resolve.

The catalogue of APC-linked electoral abuses is long and well documented by civil society monitors and international observers of which armed gangs positioned at polling units to frighten opposition voters, ballot boxes snatched or destroyed in hostile constituencies; electoral officials harassed, beaten or bribed, security agencies conspicuously passive when the perpetrators wore the right political colours.

These are not isolated incidents but operational habits, honed over successive election cycles and enabled by control of federal security apparatus. They are designed to produce not just victory, but the perception that resistance is futile.

Inglorious history

Defenders of the party point to the PDP’s own inglorious history of electoral malpractice and political thuggery.

But the Canadian court was clear in distinguishing between past and present.

While the PDP’s abuses have declined in intensity in recent years, the APC has intensified its reliance on violent and coercive methods precisely at the pinnacle of state power.

That difference is not trivial. It means the very institutions meant to curb electoral violence are now subordinated to those who benefit from it.

The international implications of the Canadian ruling are profound.

For the first time, a foreign court has, in effect, placed Nigeria’s ruling party in the same analytical category as organisations that use organised violence to shape political outcomes. This is not merely symbolic.

It opens the door for other countries to adopt similar standards, potentially restricting travel and assets for individuals closely associated with the APC. Politicians accustomed to jetting between London, Dubai and Toronto may find the world suddenly smaller.

The lesson is stark when a political party elevates intimidation into a governing principle, it invites the scrutiny and sanctions of the civilised world.

Terror at home

Nigeria cannot credibly project itself as a democracy abroad while tolerating terror at home, whether that terror comes in the form of jihadists in the North-East or ballot snatchers in the South-West.

President Bola Tinubu now stands at a crossroads. The UAE’s intelligence on Boko Haram financiers is not a matter for bureaucratic foot-dragging or political bargaining; it is a test of whether Nigeria’s government serves the security of its people or the convenience of its elites.

The names have been on file for years. They should not gather dust while insurgents rebuild and while the families of the dead, from Kano to Kogi, wait for justice.

Investigating and prosecuting those sponsors would not only honour Nigeria’s international commitments, it would signal that the days of impunity for terrorists and their political enablers alike are drawing to a close.

If Tinubu fails to act, the verdict of the Canadian Federal Court will stand not merely as a foreign legal finding, but as an indictment of a ruling party and a political culture unwilling to sever its ties to violence.

That is a legacy no leader should wish to own.

•Aduwo is Permanent Representative, Centre for Convention on Democratic Integrity Ltd/Gte (CCDI) to the United Nations and can be reached via =ØéÜ olufemi.aduwo@ccdiltd.org | <Øß www.ccdiltd.org | &þ +234 808 704 7173

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