By joshua 
The Founder’s Card: Why Zacchaeus Jonathan Could Be ADC’s Breakthrough for Kogi West Senate in 2027
… 18 years of party-building, personal projects, and tribunal-tested grit put Surveyor Zacchaeus Jonathan in a lane of his own as ADC seeks a credible face for the Red Chamber*
In Kogi West politics, loyalty is a word everyone prints on posters. Surveyor Zacchaeus Jonathan has spent 18 years proving it on the ground.
His ADC story did not start with a defection of convenience. It began in 2007 when, after being shut out of the Lokoja II Assembly ticket in the PDP, he crossed to a little-known ADC and got a mandate from the party’s founder, Chief Ralph Nwosu: “Establish this party in Kogi.” He took the brief literally. He contested that year, challenged a rigged process all the way to the Tribunal, forced a re-run, and planted the ADC flag in a state where the party barely existed.
That was the first brick. For nearly two decades, he has laid the rest.
The Builder Who Stayed
By 2018, Jonathan had opened ADC’s Lokoja office and declared that the party would “sweep aside the ruling APC.” Storms came. Factions formed. Big names drifted. He didn’t. Instead, he poured time into building youth and women structures across Lokoja and Kogi LGAs, ward by ward, year by year. While others treated ADC as a spare tyre, he treated it as home.
Even when the party’s lone Rep, Leke Abejide, endorsed President Tinubu in 2023, Zacchaeus held the line. For elders trying to keep ADC’s identity intact amid national realignments, that kind of fidelity reads like equity. For voters, it reads like character.
Receipts Without a Government Seat
Jonathan’s campaign pitch is not a manifesto. It is a ledger of things he did with personal funds. He constructed the Ganaja junction bridge to end the erosion nightmare that swallowed vehicles every rainy season. He delivered a primary school in Igahachi for displaced Bassa and Gbagyi families who had been out of classrooms for years. He donated laptops to Government Science Secondary School, Agbaja, to revive a dormant ICT lab. He bankrolled Google/Jobberman digital-skills training for Lokoja youths who could not afford data, let alone tuition. When a mosque near collapse sent out distress calls, he supplied materials to keep it standing.
“I sponsored empowerment training for youth… I paid the bills,” he told supporters in 2023. There was no subvention, no constituency allowance, no MDAs to write to. Just personal sacrifice deployed where government was absent.
*A Base That Travels With Him*
From ADC in 2019 to Labour in 2023 and the NNPP primaries in 2022, Jonathan’s platform shifted. His people did not. In 2019, a coalition called Inspired Youths described him as “synonymous with excellence” for a philanthropy streak that predated elections. His five-point mantra — competence, commitment, character, compassion, capacity — became shorthand for a brand of politics that is rare in Kogi West: service without a seat.
Why ADC Needs Him Now
Party insiders say 2027 “will be a different ballgame” because ADC in Kogi is at a crossroads: stabilize or splinter. Jonathan is being positioned as the stabilizing founder who never traded the party’s colors for appointment or access. Surveyor. GIS expert. Former lecturer. Union leader. Tribunal-tested. Project-proven. He is, in one package, the technocrat, the mobilizer, and the financier.
For a party trying to break the PDP/APC duopoly in Kogi West, fielding the man who built the house is not sentiment. It is strategy. He knows the wards because he opened them. He knows the gaps because he has been funding fixes. He knows the terrain because he has walked it without sirens for 18 years.
The Kogi West Calculus
The district’s needs are not abstract: federal roads that drain farm income, youth unemployment that fuels urban drift, schools without labs, clinics without drugs, and a Senate voice that can convert advocacy into allocations. Jonathan’s backers argue that he brings three scarce assets to that list: a clean record from years of public scrutiny, a delivery habit that predates campaigns, and a party infrastructure he personally knitted together.
“He’s not asking for a chance. He’s asking for a mandate to scale what he’s already doing,” said Mrs. Amina Usman, a women leader in Lokoja. “We have seen politicians with positions do less. We have seen Zacch with no position do more.”
*The 2027 Question*
Two questions now trail Jonathan. First, will ADC reward 18 years of loyalty by handing him the Senate ticket? Second, will Kogi West voters, long courted by bigger parties with bigger war chests, finally hand him the mandate many say he has already earned?
The answer will test two things at once: whether a party remembers the man who kept its lights on, and whether a constituency is ready to promote results over rhetoric.
For ADC, the stakes are existential. For Zacchaeus Jonathan, the moment looks like closure. For Kogi West, it may be the first time in a long while that the ballot offers a founder, not a freelancer.