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Listening to Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe on Politics Today on Channels Television was not merely engaging, it was energising, the kind of political moment that restores faith in courage, ideas and moral clarity. His intervention was not noise but substance, not performance but presence. Here was a statesman speaking from depth, not from briefing notes.
When Senator Abaribe calmly, indirectly but firmly confirmed his membership of the Coalition and his interest in the African Democratic Congress (ADC), stating that he had been part of the project from the beginning, and spoke of the quiet but decisive coming together of members of the National Assembly around a coalition effort, it became immediately clear that this was no idle talk.
This was an insider speaking with the confidence of a man who understands the moving parts of power. When he described the Tinubu APC structure as a giant with clay feet, and declared with sober assurance that APC will lose 2027, it did not sound like bravado. It sounded like diagnosis.
Then came one of the most revealing interventions of the evening.
Senator Abaribe stated plainly that Nigeria is now operating under a captured state, where institutions no longer act in the interest of the people but are bent to protect a narrow governing circle. Power has been cornered, accountability weakened, and governance converted into elite self-preservation. In one phrase, he explained the dysfunction Nigerians experience daily.
He went further, and this was even more damning. He said APC and President Tinubu are living in bubbles. Bubbles of privilege, insulation and false comfort, far removed from the grinding reality of the Nigerian masses. Within these bubbles, hardship is reduced to statistics, hunger becomes an economic theory, and pain is discussed, not felt. Those inside these bubbles neither queue for transport, nor haggle in markets, nor feel the daily terror of insecurity. They are protected from the consequences of their own policies.
With piercing moral clarity, he questioned why people in government and those orbiting President Tinubu are living in opulence, while the poor masses are being subjected to agony and excruciating pain. This was not rhetorical flourish. It was an ethical indictment. In a country where suffering is defended with economic jargon and policy abstractions, he dragged governance back to its human core and asked the most dangerous question power fears: what moral right does a government have to luxuriate while its people suffocate?
He exposed, in one stroke, the grotesque contradiction of the present order. A ruling elite cocooned in bubbles of comfort, convoys and excess, while ordinary Nigerians drown in hunger, insecurity, collapsing purchasing power and daily humiliation. He framed it not as accident or misfortune, but as the direct outcome of state capture combined with elite isolation. He did not shout. He did not insult. He diagnosed cruelty masquerading as reform.
This is gravitas. This is conscience speaking.
Senator Enyinnaya Harcourt Abaribe is no accidental figure in Nigerian politics. A former Deputy Governor of Abia State, a long-serving Senator representing Abia South, and a former Senate Minority Leader, he has earned his place through consistency, courage and ideological firmness. In the National Assembly, he distinguished himself not by flamboyance but by fearless opposition, refusing to trade scrutiny for comfort.
His role during the #BringBackOurGirls advocacy, where he staked his personal liberty as guarantor, remains one of the clearest demonstrations of political courage in recent Nigerian history. That episode sealed his reputation as a man prepared to pay a personal price for national conscience.
So when Senator Abaribe speaks today about cracks within the APC, about lawmakers gravitating towards a coalition, about the inevitability of political realignment, he is not speculating. He understands the fatigue within the system, the dangers of a government living inside bubbles, and the historical truth that no structure survives prolonged injustice, isolation and moral exhaustion.
In that studio, he did not speak merely as an opposition figure. He spoke as the custodian of a betrayed social contract. His presence in the coalition signals that what is forming is not just an electoral arrangement, but a conscious resistance against a captured state and a moral rebellion against a system that has normalised elite comfort built on popular misery.
When bubbles burst, nations realign. When illusion collapses, alternatives emerge. ADC stands as that alternative, not as rhetoric, but as an exit from capture, isolation and pain.
When a man of Senator Abaribe’s stature speaks with such clarity, history begins to lean forward. And power, however loud, begins to tremble.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General
The Narrative Force.
SB E-news.
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