Oscar Wilde, one of the wittiest writers who ever touched the pen, wrote, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay for greatness.” One must agree with the bard if we look at the new political contraption in town. It is mediocrity trying to pay for greatness. They call themselves All Democratic Alliance (ADA). They cannot live down the APC, the All Progressives Congress, even when they want to ape it. Begin with the name. They are so original that they begin their own party’s name with ALL. In order to look even more original, they swap progressives for Democratic. They must have sincerely struggled with a third name, since they have to have a third one like APC or PDP, so they look for a synonym for Congress, and they chose alliance. No doubt, they are an alliance, but an alliance of mock reality. They are an alliance of men who have been retired from politics. They are however bored, but they are rich, so they want to spend their money to titillate their fragile egos. What is David Mark looking for, and who is looking for him? Atiku was shunned at Ibadan by the governors of the PDP, so they have started their party with no state governor, no structure, but the patterns of their egocentric imaginations.When you imitate, you should make the imitated look like it is imitating you. That is what literary theorists call the anxiety of influence, and Harvard literary theorist Harold Bloom, who developed the idea, described it as “relentless wrestling with the greatest of the dead.” These men want sumo wrestling but they have no muscles. I will concede that they are overfed, but they are no sumo wrestlers from Japan. They are more like the shrunken tree outside Tokyo. They hate Tinubu so much that they must be like him. Read Also: We’ll reshape economic diplomacy to build a progressive West Africa – Tinubu These guys are funny. The exiguous El Rufai was shooed out of Kaduna. Amaechi hardly clinched more than 15 per cent of the votes after his second term, eons ago. Atiku is homeless and the others are jobless, although the Adamawa man denies he is part of it. Trouble in paradise? They are generals without an army. They have an unknown protem chairmen known as Akin Ricketts, don’t call him rickety please. And he is not small like crickets. They have plenty of money to spend on party offices, and I am sure they will pay their rents. They may not have to pay because some of them have properties they can loan until the project dies. They have money for logos, constitution, and campaigns and registrations. They will add to the Tinubu trillion-dollar economy. Imitation may have its benefits after all. In his book, The theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen says the rich spend their excess money on leisure, hence we have country clubs, polo and golf sports, yachts, etc, so as to keep boredom at bay. Our ADA folks are embarking on malice as leisure. It is a peculiar Nigerian pastime. When they have lost though, and they have spent a lot of the money they have stashed away, maybe they can know how bitterness can eat up persons as Paul says in scripture.