Nigeria, July 8 -- To merge is not to build, and to build is not to recycle. The current charade parading itself as the ADC coalition is not the birth of a national alternative but the theatre of the familiar ambition without vision, and movement without destination.

Those who speak of this ADC coalition in the same breath as the 2013 merger that produced the All Progressives Congress (APC) either do so out of ignorance or out of deep cynicism. For while the APC was forged, whatever its later contradictions around a national momentum for rupture, what is now before us is a regrouping of exhausted gladiators seeking oxygen in the political arena, not for Nigeria, but for themselves.

Let us recall: the APC was not born in a vacuum. It was...