By The PRP-Vanguard Collective
“Mun yi Kamu!” (Hausa for: “We’ve caught a big fish!”)
It is the gleeful, unmasked refrain echoing through the backrooms of Kaduna whenever a lucrative election ticket is successfully traded off to the highest bidder. This season, the political market mafia built around the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) is open for massive business, and their prime product is the historic Peoples Redemption Party (PRP) Nigeria’s most resilient stronghold of leftist, pro-masses politics.
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Across Bauchi, Kaduna, Kogi, Niger, Abuja, and Kano, a distressing script is playing out in deluge. The faction currently recognized by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as the PRP operating under the stealthy stewardship of Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed has transformed a historic ideological movement into a transactional corporate franchise.
To the real cadres of the party who have stayed true to the trenchant, socialist ideals of the late radical icon, Dr. Balarabe Musa, since 2018, this group is an alien parasite. They are not a political party; they are the “PRP-Market.”
Dr. Hakeem Baba Ahmed’s “Gang of Four” are money-focused, elitist, and unrepentantly transactional. Distant from and deeply contemptuous of the masses, they treat politics not as a vehicle for emancipation, but as a commercial enterprise governed by supply, demand, and high-stakes bidding.
Baba Ahmed’s public posturing is a study in political schizophrenia. One moment he styles himself as an estranged critic of the establishment; the next, he slides comfortably back into the corridors of power.
Until recently, he served as a presidential adviser in the office of the Vice President a plum appointment he abruptly dropped only to assume the national chairmanship of a factionalized opposition party.
Before his current incarnation, Hakeem was the media face and secretary of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) an organization whose worldview is fundamentally sectional and sectarian, miles away from the pan-Nigerian, pan-Africanist horizon of the authentic PRP.
How does a former INEC secretary, Northern sectionalist, and hard-nosed technocrat land unhindered at the helm of a party whose historical identity diametrically opposes everything he represents?
The puzzle snaps into place when one traces the invisible web of northern elite actors.
To understand the current capture of the PRP, one must look at the architects of the grand design.
- The Jega Factor: Under Professor Attahiru Jega as INEC chairman, the PRP was infamously deregistered. It took a grueling, principled legal battle led by Balarabe Musa and the party’s left wing to restore it.Yet, paradoxically, Jega later gravitated toward the market faction rather than the ideological home built by Balarabe Musa.
- The Ango Abdullahi Influence: Every keen observer of northern politics recognizes the heavy footprint of Professor Ango Abdullahi. From the controversial emergence of interim figures like Falalu Bello down to Hakeem Baba Ahmed, the heavy hand of capital over labor, and aristocrats over the masses, has consistently steered the party’s destabilization.
The grand strategy was clear: systematically capture, pervert, and immobilize the PRP. Minna-based generals and entrenched public bureaucrats seized the window when octogenarian Balarabe Musa was physically waning, utilizing compromised machinery within the electoral umpire to hand a historic progressive platform over to conservative careerists.
The ultimate culmination of this corporate takeover? The swift rolling out of the red carpet for political showman Donald Duke to snap up the party’s presidential ticket for the 2027 general elections.
The market logic does not stop at the national secretariat; it trickles down aggressively to state structures.
In Bauchi State, long-standing party veterans woke up to find that the entire party machinery had allegedly been sold off to a serving senator, Senator Buba, and his inner circle. When bewildered cadres sought explanations, they were met with brazen administrative cynicism:
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“We paid for everything. Go to your leaders in Abuja and Kaduna and ask them. We settled them already. This is how politics work on the ground.”
Comrade Shanono and other foundational veterans who refused financial inducements to sell their political birthright were summarily marginalized. The Buba loyalists, wielding deep pockets, have operated entirely outside the PRP constitution, the Electoral Act, and INEC’s own regulatory guidelines.
Similar hostile takeovers are playing out across Kano, Kaduna, and beyond. Under the convenient excuse of a “new recruitment drive,” the PRP-Market leadership operating with a skeleton crew out of Abuja has bypassed legitimate, registered structures.
Desperate politicians from mainstream ruling parties who lost out in their primaries have simply treated Mr. Slick’s faction as a convenient fallback storefront.
The architects of this grand auction operate as though the rule of law is a minor inconvenience. Section 49(1)(a)(vi) of the INEC Regulations and Guidelines for Political Parties explicitly mandates the deregistration or sanction of any party whose constitution and operations fail to ensure periodic democratic governance or leadership selection.
Yet, temporary mandates are abused, executive positions are traded without convention delegates, and the foundational ideals of democratic accountability are treated with open contempt.
This brand of mercenary politics explains precisely why democratic consolidation remains fragile in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic.
Veto players prefer secrecy, backroom cronyism, and primitive capital accumulation to genuine popular participation.
The Falalu-Hakeem saga is a tragic symptom of a broader institutional decay where compromised arbiters collude with political merchants to strip the masses of their most resilient political vehicles.
But the resistance has drawn a hard line.
The PRP-Vanguard has resolved to take the battlefront to the courts. Armed with historic duty, authentic mass backing, and an unwavering commitment to internal party democracy, the vanguard is moving to dismantle the ticket-racketeering cartel through every legal avenue available.
As history has repeatedly taught the progressive movement in Nigeria: once you take the first step to the courts against elite impunity, you do not look back until the end. Only then will the true face of justice emerge.
PRP NASARA (VICTORY)
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© Published by the PRP-Vanguard Collective (Abuja & Diaspora – UK)
16 October 2026
