2007
The party ran Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who defected from the People's Democratic Party, as its presidential candidate in the 2007 presidential election. Abubakar was disqualified from the election by the Independent National Electoral Commission, but the disqualification was later overturned by the Supreme Court. Currently, the party's most prominent elected official is governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State. Also very prominent in the party is the political brain behind the party, Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu, the former Governor of Lagos State and erstwhile Senator in the Third Republica. Tinubu is noted for his astute Pro-Democracy credentials and progressive Federalist Principles that saw him clash severally with former President Olusegun Obasanjo of the more conservative unitarian school of thought.
The party was torn apart by in-house fighting that led prominent party Chieftain and Lagos State Gubernatorial Candidate, Femi Pedro, to decamp to the Nigeria Labour Party. Pedro cited gross manipulation within the party structure favouring Tinubu's candidates in South-Western Nigeria as his reason for dumping the newly-formed Party. Additionally, there have been rumours of cracks in the Party's initial alliance with the prominent national opposition party, the All Nigeria Peoples Party.
In the 21 April 2007 Nigerian National Assembly election, the party won 32 out of 360 seats in the House of Representatives and 6 out of 109 seats in the Senate.
Following the victory of PDP candidate Umaru Yar'Adua in the 2007 presidential election, the AC has been pursuing a legal challenge to the results. On July 6, 2007, the party announced its rejection of an offer to join Yar'Adua's government (an offer that was accepted by the ANPP and the Progressive Peoples Alliance), with a spokesman saying that "there is no compelling moral, legal or political reason for us to join a government that we have told the whole world stole its mandate" and that participating in the government would mean "partaking in stolen goods".
However, on August 7, 2007, the National Secretary, Bashir Dalhatu, resigned (along with two other officials) over the refusal of the Action Congress to take up Yar'adua's offer. He was replaced by the current Secretary, Usman Bugaje.
Read more about this topic: Action Congress Of Nigeria (ACN)