Dino Melaye Says He Will Sue Over A Tax Chief's Place On The Campaign Council
Abuja · Sunday 23 August 2026
Dino Melaye has vowed to go to court over Zacch Adedeji's role in the APC 2027 presidential campaign structure. Adedeji is the executive chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service.
Melaye is a reliably combustible figure and it is easy to file this under political theatre. The underlying question is not theatrical.
The narrow objection
Nigerian public service rules restrict serving public officers from partisan political activity. The reasoning is not complicated. A revenue authority decides who gets audited. An officer who is simultaneously working to re-elect a president is exposed to a question about whether those two roles ever touch, and so is every business he assesses.
That is true whether or not anything improper occurs. The rule exists to remove the question, not to punish an outcome.
| Body | Why partisan involvement is a problem |
|---|---|
| Revenue service | Decides audits and assessments of businesses and donors |
| Anti-graft commissions | Decide who is investigated during a campaign |
| Electoral commission | Runs the election itself |
| Security agencies | Deploy on polling day |
The four categories where the separation matters most, and where it is tested every cycle.
What a suit would actually have to establish
Three things, and only the first is easy.
That Adedeji holds the role alleged. That the role constitutes partisan political activity within the meaning of the rules that apply to him. And that a court is the right forum rather than an internal administrative process.
Nigerian pre-election litigation is crowded and slow. A suit filed now on a question of public service conduct is unlikely to be resolved before the 16 January vote, which is usually the point of filing it.
Most Nigerian pre-election suits are not attempts to win a judgment. They are attempts to make a fact public and keep it there.
The wider pattern
The campaign council released on Saturday is enormous, as Nigerian campaign councils always are, and the larger a council the more likely it is to sweep in people whose day jobs sit awkwardly beside it. Criticism has already come from APC chieftain Babafemi Ojudu, from the ADC, and from civil society groups.
The useful version of this argument is not about any one name. It is whether Nigeria is prepared to draw a visible line between the machinery of the state and the machinery of a campaign, during the 150 days when the two are hardest to tell apart.
Reporting: Sahara Reporters, Daily Post, The Nation and Vanguard.
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