Has APC Exhausted Its Electoral Goodwill? – Abdul Mahmud

By Abdul Mahmud

In my op-ed last week, Nigeria’s CODESA Moment, I argued that the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) had not yet entered the kind of unmistakable electoral decline that would make its defeat in 2027 a reasonable assumption. That, however, is not the same as saying that the APC is electorally invulnerable. The more immediate question is whether the party has now exhausted enough of its electoral goodwill to become vulnerable to defeat in the 2027 presidential election. Its institutional capacity to win elections remains beyond serious dispute, but institutional power is not the same thing as electoral consent. The relevant test, therefore, is whether the APC still commands sufficient support among voters to overcome the combined effects of incumbency fatigue, political disaffection and the growing capacity of an opposition, however fragmented, to mobilise against it. The recent record of Nigeria’s off-cycle governorship elections offers an imperfect but useful starting point for examining that question.

Since 2023 general election, the APC has contested eight off-cycle governorship elections in Bayelsa, Imo, Kogi, Edo, Ondo, Anambra, Ekiti and Osun. It won five of them and lost three. At first sight, that record appears formidable. A closer examination produces a rather more complicated picture. In Bayelsa, Timipre Sylva polled 110,108 votes against Douye Diri’s 175,196. In Imo, Hope Uzodinma secured 540,308 votes, while his two principal challengers, Samuel Anyanwu and Athan Achonu, together obtained 135,584. Kogi produced 446,237 votes for Usman Ododo against 259,052 for Murtala Ajaka and 46,362 for Dino Melaye. The two subsequent victories are equally instructive. In Edo, Monday Okpebholo defeated Asue Ighodalo by 291,667 votes to 247,274, a margin of 44,393 in an election in which the opposition was divided between the PDP and Labour Party. In Ondo, Lucky Aiyedatiwa obtained 366,781 votes against Agboola Ajayi’s 117,845, winning all 18 local government areas. Anambra was the reverse of that picture: Charles Soludo of APGA won overwhelmingly with 422,664 votes, while the APC candidate, Uche Ekwunife, managed 99,445.
Across those eight elections, APC candidates accumulated over 1.85 million votes. That number is large, but numbers detached from their electoral context can be deceptive. The more revealing question is how much of that vote represents durable political attachment and how much is attributable to incumbency, local political structures, candidate-specific advantages, fragmented opposition, patronage, the deployment of state resources or the peculiar circumstances under which each election was conducted.

No serious analysis should simply subtract alleged votes bought, intimidation or institutional interference from declared results and announce the residue as the “real” APC vote. Such an exercise would require evidence that can withstand scrutiny. There were, however, credible concerns surrounding aspects of several recent elections, including reports of irregularities and questions about electoral integrity. Civil society assessments of the 2023 Bayelsa, Imo and Kogi elections recorded substantial concerns, while subsequent assessments of the 2024 Edo and Ondo elections also examined issues such as overvoting and the integrity of the ballot. The more useful exercise is therefore to ask what happens to APC’s electoral position when the advantages of incumbency are placed under greater pressure and when opposition parties begin to behave as though victory, rather than mere participation, is the objective.

That is where the eight elections become politically revealing.

APC’s victories in Imo, Kogi and Ondo were substantial. Its victory in Edo was considerably narrower. Its defeat in Bayelsa, Anambra and Osun demonstrated that the APC could still be beaten in a state where the incumbent possessed a strong local political base. However, Anambra offered perhaps the most striking warning. APGA’s Soludo won with 422,664 votes, more than four times the APC candidate’s total, despite the enormous resources and visibility available to a governing party at the centre.

Anambra should not be treated as a template for 2027. Neither should Imo or Ondo. State elections are shaped by local political histories, personalities, ethnic and regional calculations, incumbency and the peculiar organisation of political parties. The presidential election will operate on a different scale. Nevertheless, these elections expose a weakness that the APC cannot afford to dismiss: its electoral strength is not uniformly transferable across Nigeria. That weakness becomes more consequential when placed beside the condition of the opposition. The APC’s greatest electoral asset may not be its own popularity but the fragmentation of those who oppose it. The opposition remains dispersed among parties whose leaders have frequently struggled to subject personal ambitions to a common electoral project. The experience of the 2023 presidential election demonstrated the consequences of that fragmentation, when the opposition vote was divided among Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Rabiu Kwankwaso and others. The 2024 Edo election provided another illustration of how division can make a competitive race more difficult for the challenger: the APC won, while the PDP came second and Labour Party came a distant third.

That is the paradox of 2027. APC may be electorally vulnerable without being electorally exhausted. The distinction is crucial.

A ruling party can lose goodwill and still win an election. Electoral politics is not a popularity contest in which the candidate with the greater reservoir of public dissatisfaction automatically loses. Victory requires organisation, credible candidates, polling-unit presence, voter mobilisation, legal preparedness and the capacity to translate public sentiment into actual votes. The opposition presently has considerable work to do in each of those areas. The streets matter in this equation. By “connection to the streets” I do not mean social-media popularity or the ability to generate online outrage. Nigerian elections are still ultimately won at polling units, wards and local government areas. The political party that can identify its supporters, persuade them to register, ensure that they vote, protect their votes and remain present through collation possesses an advantage that no amount of online enthusiasm can substitute for.
APC understands this reality. Its strength is not simply the unpopularity of President Bola Tinubu or the performance of his government. The party has inherited and consolidated an extensive network of political actors across the states. Governors, legislators, local party structures and political appointees provide party political and organisational reaches that fragmented opposition parties presently struggle to match. An opposition party that discovers this only during the campaign will have discovered it too late.

The assumption that APC has already exhausted its electoral goodwill therefore requires qualification. The party may have suffered a significant erosion of goodwill, but erosion is not exhaustion, and dissatisfaction is not automatically an electoral majority. Nigerians may be unhappy with the party’s performance in government and still vote for the governing party if the opposition presents a disunited front. They may also prefer continuity where they distrust the opposition more than they dislike the incumbent. The real danger to APC is that 2027 could become an election in which accumulated dissatisfaction meets an opposition that has finally learnt how to organise. That combination would be different from the scattered contests of recent years. A disparate opposition gives the APC room to survive with pluralities. A coordinated opposition could transform the same underlying numbers into a formidable challenge.

For the opposition, therefore, the lesson from the eight off-cycle elections is not that APC is finished. The lesson is that APC can be beaten, but only by an opposition prepared to do the unglamorous work of winning elections. The figures from Bayelsa, Anambra and Osun demonstrate that the ruling party is not invincible. Edo demonstrates that fragmentation can rescue it from a competitive contest. Imo, Kogi and Ondo demonstrate the continuing power of incumbency and political organisation.

The 2027 election will therefore be decided less by declarations about APC’s declining goodwill than by whether the opposition can convert that decline into an organised electoral force. If it remains disparate, disconnected from the streets and preoccupied with elite negotiations, APC may win despite the erosion of its popularity. If it builds a broad political coalition, develops credible candidates and establishes a physical presence where votes are actually cast and counted, the numbers begin to tell a very different story. APC may have less goodwill than it once enjoyed. Whether that becomes defeat in 2027 will depend substantially on what its opposition does with the opportunity.