The Tree, The Root and The Rot: A Philosophical Indictment of Constitutional Subversion in Nigeria’s Political Culture – An Essay on the Metaphysics of the Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC)

By Umar Ardo, Ph.D

The Axiom Restated
Jesus of Nazareth, in the Sermon on the Mount, delivers one of history’s most devastating political theorems: “Every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Therefore by their fruits thou shall know them.” (Matthew 7:17–20, NKJV)

2. This is not mere moralistic poetry. It is a claim about ontological continuity – the insistence that essence precedes and determines expression, that being conditions doing, that the architecture of a thing’s origin constitutes the DNA of its destiny. The tree does not choose its fruit arbitrarily; the fruit is the visible syntax of the tree’s invisible grammar. To examine the fruit is to perform an autopsy on the root.
3. What, then, are we to make of politicians of national stature, such as Gov. Peter Obi, Gov. Rabiu Kwankwaso, Gov. Kabiru Gaya, Sen. A’ishatu Ahmed Binani and a host of others, grafting themselves onto a political party whose very existence emerged not through constitutional germination but through judicial chicanery? The Nigerian Democratic Congress (NDC) which circumvented the entire architecture of democratic legitimacy in the 2025 INEC’s registration exercise symbolizes the antithesis of democracy. No formal application beyond a letter of intent. No administrative fee paid. No shortlisting. No portal application. No compliance with constitutional requirements, the Electoral Act or INEC guidelines. No complete participation in the whole process. Only a letter of “expression of intent,” a lawsuit built on “unsubstantiated claims” and a court judgment that, by the account of those who have examined the Certified True Copy of the court processes, constitutes nothing less than judicial murder – the killing of jurisprudence itself! The question is not whether these politicians are individually corrupt. The question is whether they possess the epistemic humility to recognize that the tree they now cultivate is poisoned at the root, and whether they possess the moral courage to refuse its fruit.
4. Gov. Obi is said to have studied philosophy in the university, therefore he will know the precept of metaphysics of illegitimate origin on a matter. The registration of a political party in a constitutional democracy is not a bureaucratic nuisance. It is a rite of civic legitimation; a ritual through which private association is transubstantiated into public instrumentality! The Constitution, the Electoral Act and INEC regulations constitute the lex loci – the law of the place where political power must be born if it is to claim democratic parentage.
5. When an entity bypasses this ritual, it commits what the political philosopher Hannah Arendt would recognize as an assault on natality – the capacity to begin something new in the world! Arendt argued that every genuine political act must be born into a public space where it can be seen, judged and held accountable. A party that emerges not through the arduous labour of constitutional compliance but through the shortcut of judicial manipulation is stillborn. It has no public natality. It enters the world not as a legitimate actor but as a phantom political entity with the form of democracy but the substance of usurpation.
6. This is not hyperbole. Consider these specific violations – no application, no fee, no shortlisting, no portal engagement, no regulatory compliance, no any participation whatsoever. This is not a case of defective compliance like a missing signature or a late filing. This is systemic non-compliance – a comprehensive failure to participate in the very processes that distinguish democratic association from arbitrary conspiracy. And then, the coup de grâce – a court judgment obtained through claims that could not withstand evidentiary scrutiny, followed by INEC’s inexplicable haste to register and its refusal to appeal despite the “glaring irregularities” that even lay observers can discern. The metaphysical implication is stark: the NDC’s existence is constitutionally inaccurate. Not merely irregular. Not merely controversial. Inaccurate – because it obtained by other means what it could not obtain by merit, and because it now parades itself as a legitimate vehicle for the democratic will while wearing the stolen garments of constitutional recognition.
7. The American constitutional jurisprudence that we copied recognizes what is called the “fruit of the poisonous tree” doctrine – evidence derived from illegal conduct is itself tainted and inadmissible! But the principle is older and deeper than American law. It is the principle of metaphysical contamination: that which is born of corruption cannot escape corruption’s signature. Peter Obi built a national reputation – however contested – on a platform of institutional integrity, fiscal discipline and procedural righteousness. Rabiu Kwankwaso, whatever his critics allege, cultivated an image of grassroots mobilization and developmental governance. Kabiru Gaya and Senator Binani carry the weight of legislative experience. These are not political novices unaware of constitutional mechanics. They are sophisticated operators who understand precisely what it means for a party to have bypassed constitutional and INEC’s regulatory architecture. And yet they have joined this entity with their eyes wide open.
8. The philosophical question is not “Are they corrupt?” but rather: What conception of political morality must they hold to believe that the end of electoral contestation justifies the means of constitutional circumvention? What theory of the state allows them to treat democratic legitimacy as a convenience rather than a constraint? What anthropology of citizenship that will permit them to ask Nigerians to vote for a party that, by its very existence, insults the constitutional order those Nigerians are asked to affirm?
9. This is where Matthew 7:17–20 becomes not merely a biblical citation but a diagnostic instrument. Jesus does not say, “A good tree usually bears good fruit.” He does not say, “A bad tree might bear bad fruit.” He states an ontological necessity: the fruit is the revelation of the root! And the contrapositive is equally devastating: if the fruit is rotten, the tree is rotten, regardless of how attractive its branches may appear. The NDC’s fruit is already visible. It was born in evasion, nurtured in litigious manipulation, recognized in administrative capitulation and now parades itself in official deception by having INEC publish on its website names of national officers of the NDC under the false claim of a court order that the commission cannot itself produce. These are not growing pains. These are structural deformities – the inevitable expression of a root that never touched constitutional soil.
10. In this is seen the complicity of the principled as espoused in the Kantian philosophy. Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative demands that we act only according to maxims we can will as universal law. But there is a lesser-known Kantian formulation equally devastating here: the kingdom of ends, which requires that we treat humanity, whether in our own person or in others, never merely as a means, but always as an end. What thence are politicians of integrity doing when they join a party of questionable constitutional base? They are instrumentalizing themselves. They are permitting their reputation, their record, their accumulated public trust, to be used as camouflage for an entity that could not survive naked exposure. They become, in effect, human shields for institutional illegitimacy, lending their credibility to sanitize a process that, left to itself, would provoke popular revulsion.
11. This is not coalition-building. This is not pragmatic realignment. This is moral money laundering taking reputational capital earned (or at least claimed) through procedural legitimacy and depositing it into an account whose assets were obtained through procedural theft. And the Nigerian electorate is expected to accept this transaction as normal politics. Kant would recognize this as a catastrophe of practical reason: the moment when rational beings, capable of legislating morality for themselves, instead choose to become accomplices in their own deception. Politicians who know the constitutional requirements, who have read the Electoral Act, who understand that the NDC’s registration is a judicial fiction, and who still join the party, then these politicians have not merely made a tactical error, but they have committed a categorical mistake in moral philosophy: they have confused the appearance of democratic participation with the reality of democratic legitimacy!
12. In all this, it is INEC’s seeming capitulation and institutional suicide as a watchdog that is worrisome. Hence its conduct in this affair deserves philosophical autopsy. A regulatory body charged with gatekeeping democratic entry has not merely opened the gate – it has demolished the wall, then published a map claiming the wall was never there. The refusal to appeal a judgment that, by informed accounts, constitutes “judicial murder” is not administrative discretion. It is institutional abdication and a surrender of regulatory sovereignty to a court process that clearly has abandoned evidentiary standards. The publication of specific national officer names without a court order mandating such publication is not bureaucratic efficiency. It is official deception – a lie inscribed on government letterhead!
13. Here we encounter the political philosophy of Max Weber, who insisted that the modern state claims a monopoly on legitimate violence and legitimate procedure. INEC’s legitimacy derives entirely from its role as impartial arbiter of electoral rules. When it ceases to arbitrate and instead becomes a passive executor of judicial irregularity, it ceases to be INEC in any meaningful sense. It becomes a notary of fraud, stamping official seals on documents that its own regulations should have prevented from existing.
14. And the politicians who join the NDC knowing this history? They are not merely joining a party. They are ratifying an institutional suicide. They are signaling to every future political entrepreneur that constitutional compliance is optional, that regulatory gatekeeping is negotiable and that the path to democratic recognition runs not through the arduous work of building compliant institutions but through the strategic deployment of litigation and administrative pressure.
15. The essay’s central anxiety – and it is a properly eschatological anxiety, a fear of what is to come – can now be stated with precision. If these politicians will join a party that obtained its existence through clear circumvention of constitutionalism, through rule-of-law subversion, through public integrity degradation, then what kind of government will they form if elected? In other words, what would a government of such politicians in such a political party produce?
16. The questions answer themselves through the logic of the tree and the fruit. A party born in evasion will govern in evasion – evading transparency, evading accountability, evading the very constitutional constraints it already proved willing to bypass for mere registration. A party born in litigious manipulation will govern in manipulation, using courts not as forums of justice but as instruments of power, filing claims not to vindicate rights but to manufacture realities. A party born in administrative capitulation will govern in capitulation – surrendering regulatory functions to political pressure, abandoning institutional independence for expedient survival. A party born in official deception will govern in deception – publishing false claims, inventing mandates, treating the public as subjects of propaganda rather than citizens of a republic.
17. This is not prophecy. This is deduction – the rigorous working-out of the principle that the tree determines the fruit. A mango seed does not produce cashews. A poisoned root does not produce nourishing harvest. And a political party that could not bring itself to comply with the entry-level requirements of democratic legitimacy will not, upon acquiring power, suddenly discover a reverence for constitutional constraint. There is, in this affair, a genuine tragedy, not the melodrama of partisan conflict, but the classical tragedy of character flaw compounding into collective catastrophe. Nigeria’s political culture suffers from a deficit of institutional trust. Decades of military intervention, civilian autocracy and electoral fraud have left citizens skeptical of democratic promises. Into this landscape, figures like Peter Obi emerged (or were constructed) as exceptions – technocrats, reformers, men and women whose personal integrity might compensate for systemic dysfunction. Whether this construction was ever accurate is beside the point.
18. The point is that reputational capital in Nigerian politics is scarce, fragile and desperately needed. Every time a figure of perceived integrity joins an entity of demonstrated illegitimacy, that capital is not merely spent; it is counterfeited. It enters circulation as apparently valuable currency but carries no backing, no constitutional gold standard. And the public, already cynical, learns a devastating lesson: that even the “good” politicians are ultimately interchangeable with the corrupt system they claim to oppose.
19. This is the deepest wound. Not the specific policy failures an NDC government might produce, but the epistemic damage to democratic hope itself. When citizens cannot distinguish between genuine reformers and performative ones, when the tree and the fruit no longer correlate in any predictable way, democratic citizenship becomes impossible. One cannot vote for change if one cannot identify which branches carry genuine fruit and which carry plastic simulations.
20. It is therefore apt to conclude this essay with a clarion call for radical integrity. Matthew 7:17–20 is not merely descriptive. In its biblical context, it is prescriptive – a warning that false prophets will come in sheep’s clothing and that the disciple’s task is to exercise discernment. “By their fruits thou shall know them” is an imperative to judge, to evaluate and not to be deceived by appearance. The Nigerian electorate faces precisely this imperative. The NDC’s fruit is already visible: a registration obtained through constitutional evasion, a judicial process that reads like “judicial murder,” an electoral body that surrendered its regulatory duty and now a roster of politicians willing to lend their names to this edifice of procedural trickery.
21. But the judgment must extend beyond the electorate to the politicians themselves. There is still time – there is always time, until the polls open or the oaths are sworn – for radical integrity. For the refusal to participate in legitimating illegitimacy. For the recognition that some vehicles are too compromised to carry any passenger with self-respect intact. The tree has been planted. The root is poisoned. The fruit is forming. And the philosophers, the constitutionalists, the citizens and the scriptures all ask the same question with terrible unanimity: If you will nourish this tree, what fruit do you expect to bear? And more devastatingly, what fruit do you deserve? The ax is already at the root of the trees. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. (Matthew 3:10)
22. God help Nigeria.