Adding Salt to Injury:The machiavellian farce of the NDC reconciliation committee

In the cynicism of modern power politics, few spectacles are as insultingly transparent as a thief appointing himself mediator over the very house he just ransacked.

Having left a trail of compromised processes, backroom betrayals, and stolen mandates, the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC) now offers its latest political contraption: a “National Reconciliation Committee.”

To parade this panel before aggrieved party faithful—particularly across regions like the South-East and Abia state in particular that have consistently borne the brunt of institutional sabotage—is not an act of statecraft. It is a calculated mockery. It is adding burning salt to an open, festering wound.

Reconciliation is not a public relations broom designed to sweep systemic fraud under a carpet of artificial harmony. Nor is it a weaponized slogan meant to browbeat victims into silence while the beneficiaries of injustice parade their stolen spoils. When a party executive actively orchestrates or enables a process that deprives its own members of their hard-earned mandates, it permanently forfeits the moral authority to preach peace.

The entire enterprise collapses under the weight of its own bad faith, exposed by three unyielding laws of justice:

1. The Fraud of the Guilty Broker: An entity cannot serve as the executioner, the judge, and the benevolent peacemaker. By appointing its own agents to oversee “peace,” the NDC executive converts a legitimate demand for justice into an enforced submission. It ensures the wrongdoer dictates the terms, controls the timeline, and writes the final verdict.

2. Peace Without Restitution is Conquest: True reconciliation requires consequences for the transgressor and restoration for the wronged. Asking aggrieved aspirants to “shake hands and move on” without returning what was taken—or at minimum penalizing the architects of the subversion—demands that victims ratify their own disenfranchisement under the cowardly banner of “party loyalty.”

3. Building Peace on Stolen Ground: Any peace that accepts the fruits of illegitimacy merely codifies the crime. If the baseline of negotiation begins after the theft has been consolidated, the committee is not restoring order; it is institutionalizing political burglary as standard operating procedure.

This panel was never assembled to heal wounds; it was deployed to enforce compliance. It invites the betrayed to sit at a table set by those who robbed them, offering hollow platitudes in exchange for total surrender.

To participate in this tribunal is to legitimize a rigged game. True peace cannot take root in the poisoned soil of unpunished fraud.

Until the NDC finds the rare courage to dismantle its illegitimate outcomes, return stolen mandates, and submit to genuinely independent arbitration, this reconciliation committee remains what it was always intended to be: a hollow charade, a desperate cover-up, and an unpardonable insult to democratic integrity.

Chief Dr. Kachi Iheme writes from Isuikwuato/Umunneochi federal constituency in Abia State, Nigeria.