Abuja — The African Democratic Congress (ADC) yesterday launched a nationwide membership registration exercise, pledging that only real, verifiable people will be recorded on its rolls and rejecting the practice of inflating membership with fake identities.
Senator David Mark, national chairman of the party, said the exercise is intended to build “the architecture of trust” and vowed that no one who seeks to register will be denied a card provided they abide by party rules. “Whether you are our friend or you are our enemy, as long as you want to register with us, and as long as you abide by our dos and don’ts, we will give you our cards,” he said at the flag-off in Abuja.
Mark criticised practices in some parties where membership cards are bought in bulk and hoarded. “Somebody will buy the cards and keep them in his room… One person will take the whole card and they will be giving it to you on a piecemeal basis,” he said. “For ADC, it is our card for all ADC members. Our cards will not be kept in the rooms. Our cards will be given to our members.”
The former Senate president also asserted the party’s ambitions for the national ballot, declaring that ADC will form the federal government in 2027.
Echoing Mark, ADC national secretary Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola warned against bloating registers with fictitious members to create an illusion of strength. “The registers are fat, but the structures are hollow. We must not follow that path. We must resist — with every fibre of our conviction — the temptation to bloat our figures with imaginary people,” he said.
Aregbesola added that a large but superficial register “does not strengthen us” and called for “conscious members — men and women who understand what this party stands for and are willing to work for it.”
Kashim Imam, chairman of the ADC Membership Mobilisation, Revalidation and Registration Committee, said the party is supplying each state with 50,000 membership cards and will run both online and manual registration to ensure broad participation. “We have opened the platform for everybody and anybody who wants to be a member of the African Democratic Congress to get registered,” he said.
Deputy chairperson of the committee, Aisha Yesufu, said a web application has been adopted for online registration to prevent system bottlenecks. She said the means of identification for registrants is the voter’s identification number, and lamented that many citizens do not have a National Identification Number (NIN). Yesufu said the registration process is quick — “a minute or two” — and includes a passport photograph and a QR code linking to the registrant’s details. “At any time you can always bring up the details of the person that is there,” she explained.
The ADC said the combined online and manual approach is intended to avoid disenfranchising potential members and to ensure transparency in the build-up to the 2027 elections.
