Andy Ezeani
Tuesday, May 26, 2026
Poor losers in the All-Progressives Congress (APC) primary elections! They can’t even go to court.
In inter-party contestations, especially since the whirlwind 2023 general election, APC members always taunted any party that felt cheated at elections to go to court. The tongue-in-cheek counsel was anchored on their conviction of the certain outcome that awaited any such futile endeavour. It is their court, literally.
It is a different ball game in intra-party affairs. Nigerian laws leave no doors open for those short-changed in internal party contests to even go to court. If you are undone in internal party matters, you are undone. If you are led like a lamb to the slaughter, too bad, as per Siminalaye Fubara.
The hue and cries raised in various quarters within the APC in the last one week, by contestants in the party primaries who alleged blatant travesty in the exercise, were bound, ab initio, to be futile. The cries of anguish have very little prospect of redemption.
To all intents and purposes, the APC has moved on. Its public stance on the primaries is that all went well. It was democracy at work, ala APC.
As the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Felix Morka emphasized at a television outing late last week, the party’s various primary elections were in substantial compliance with the laws guiding the party’s primaries. For the APC members who felt otherwise, too bad.
In the wake of the governorship and National Assembly primary elections of the party across the states last week,various contestants had screamed blue murder. The protesters decried the brazenness in the process that allegedly stood transparency and credibility on their heads.
From Nasarawa and Adamawa to Delta, Ekiti, Ondo, Gombe, and Oyo States, among others, those who felt short-changed in the exercise have been crying out for justice. Unfortunately, the cries for justice may have gone into voice mail, to adopt the common Nigerian expression of a message that hits a dead end.
Bayo Adelabu, the immediate past Minister of Power,for instance, aspired to the governorship of Oyo State. He left his plum ministerial job to pursue his ambition.
Consequently, Adelabu put himself up for the governorship primary election to be the candidate of the APC. The former minister ended up not knowing when the train left the station. His reaction to the outcome of the governorship primary election in Oyo State gives the impression that Mr. Adedibu is in the APC but not exactly of APC. He doesn’t seem to get it.
Following the announcement by the party of the outcome of the governorship primary in Oyo State, a befuddled Adelabu, publicly wondered, “how can Sarafadeen Alli (the declared winner) poll 578,143 votes when the official APC membership in Oyo State is not up to 500,000?” That is not the type of question an APC member asks.
Trust Nigerians, someone cheekily responded online to the former Power Minister’s bafflement, that what he got was an “Estimated figure”, a parody of the phenomenon of contrived “estimated electricity bill” which was hung on the neck of millions of hapless Nigerians under Adelabu’s watch as Minister of Power. That’s an aside.
In Nasarawa State, former Executive Vice Chairman of the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), Professor Mohammad Sani Haruna who also participated in the governorship primary election was quoted as dismissing the exercise as “a sham and sheer allocation of figures”.
Prof. Haruna alluded to “widespread irregularities, intimidation and disenfranchisement of party members”, referring to the eventual winner of the exercise as “a government appointed aspirant”.
Prof. Haruna was not saying anything new. In the APC, appointing candidates, rather than electing them, is the norm. The professor, like many of those who alleged being short-changed in the primaries, did not show themselves to have APC DNA. At best, they did not understand the environment in which they operate. That is rather surprising. Or did they expect that APC would change its ways because the election was intra-party?
An analysis of the list of the individuals who emerged successful in the APC primaries in the various states, either as governorship or senatorial candidates, is revealing. The candidates preponderantly consist of sitting governors rounding off their gubernatorial tenures, former governors or appointees of governors. That’s the APC way. President Tinubu as the owner of the party handed it over to the governors.
It is instructive, in more ways than one, that some of the party members who felt cheated at the primary elections hinged their hope of finding justice, not on any machinery of the party for correcting wrongs, but on President Bola Tinubu coming to their rescue. Very pathetic.
It was sad listening to Senator Ned Nwoko of Delta North speaking on a television interview of what he said was a distorted party primary. All through his television appearance, Nwoko kept repeating that he believed that “the President would intervene”.
In another prime-time television outing following another decried senatorial primary election, this time in Ekiti State, Senator Ayo Arise, who claimed to have tons of visual evidence to prove the charade of the primary election, repeatedly expressed the confidence that “the President will intervene”.
Up till now, the said president has not intervened in any of the cases. How can he? The same man who, as part of his survival strategy, handed over the process entirely to the governors?
The reality of citizens, including prominent members of the society, hinging their political future on the intervention of one strong man rather than on a strong institutional mechanism, speaks of what ails the Nigerian state. How can any one man be the ultimate decider of what is right and just? A man whose conduct is identified with upending wholesome values in the political system?
What transpired at the primary elections of the APC in the last two weeks should be of great concern to all Nigerians and beyond.
Thanks to technology, especially the now ubiquitous android telephones and their camera devices, Nigerians saw the APC primaries as they were.
The optics were awful. They captured criminality in full flight, in the full glare of the world.
Having queues of supposed party members at a primary election and openly counting them in a most crooked and bizarre method in which 1,2,3,4 jumped to 100, then to 1200, then 7000…etc. without any such large number of persons seen anywhere, is not just unconscionable, but criminality taken to the next level.
And to imagine that this was the counting method through which the party selected individuals who will, in due course, be addressed as “Honourable” or “His excellency”, either as governors or president. This is a most heinous assault on the ethical foundation of society.
Where now is the moral basis for the EFCC to be chasing fraudsters around?
APC has done serious harm to itself and to Nigeria. It would have been better if it quietly compiled and released a list of its candidates for the 2027 elections. The only useful aspect of the so-called primaries of the ruling party is the notice it served to Nigerians of what will confront them at the general election in the months ahead.
