They were frightened by the enormous power of incumbency, submitted to false promises, and hurriedly defected to the party they thought they were genuinely welcomed. But those intelligent enough read the writing on the wall by defecting to saner climes than jam packing themselves in a party under Tinubu’s dictatorship and manipulation without tentative direction. The likes of Governors Seyi Makinde of Oyo State, Bala Muhammed of Bauchi State, Sen. Abdul Ahmed Ningi and a host of others, resisted all temptations, threats and intimidations from joining the APC colony.
Instead of joining the colony of manipulation and frustration, they defected to opposition parties and formed the necessary structure ready for the 2027 battle. Seyi Makinde and Bala Muhammed are pillars in Allied Peoples’ Movement (APM), while Sen. Ningi quietly joined his fellow players in African Democratic Congress (ADC) for safety of his political career painstakingly built over the years.
While defecting opposition governors seeking a second tenure in Tinubu’s colony were given automatic tickets for reelection by virtue of the strategic positions they occupy, others for national and state assemblies were automatically NOT CLEARED by the various screening committees for the contest. They were deceived, fooled, and abandoned in the middle of the stream without a compass for direction.
The aftermath of the APC House of Representatives, Senate, and State House of Assembly primary elections disappointed several serving lawmakers and left them to count their losses in the cold. However, the worst hit by the deceit are those lawmakers from PDP, LP and NNPP who sheepishly, cowardly and greedily abandoned their natural habitats to Tinubu’s colony of deceit in the hope of guaranteeing their return to parliament in 2027 on APC platform. They were had an arranged crash out of the APC primaries with nothing to show for their miscalculated political gamble.
For them, the betrayal is doubly painful and it should serve as a lesson against greed. They abandoned the parties that provided them their mandates, severed ties with the movements that carried them to power and staked their political futures on a ruling party that ultimately showed them little mercy when it mattered most.
To understand the depth of the crisis facing those lawmakers, it is necessary for instance to revisit the extraordinary political circumstances of 2023 with the weaker Labour Party as an example. In the general election, a total of 35 lawmakers were elected to the House of Representatives on the platform of LP alone. That victory recorded by LP was due to the influence of its presidential candidate, Peter Gregory Obi who transformed what was ab initio a marginal player in Nigerian politics into a genuine mass movement of sorts.
The implication was that several obscure politicians, who under normal circumstances would have struggled to win a ward election, rode the crest of Obi’s unprecedented popularity straight to the Green Chamber. Their victories owed less to individual political structures than to the collective energy of a generation of young Nigerians who turned out in their millions to vote for a candidate they believed represented a new beginning.
That euphoria, however, proved fragile. Within months of the election, LP was artificially convulsed by leadership crisis of considerable severity that forced Obi out. Before then, Obi and the authentic party leadership struggled to navigate the turbulence, 15 of its 35 lawmakers abandoned ship to the deceitful colony, APC. They severed ties with the Obi on whose influence they rode to power, but suddenly crossed the aisle to the more humiliating party, APC, citing the interests of their constituents as justification for the betrayal that many observers described as a straightforward act of political nomadism, opportunism and prostitution.
Each of the defectors had rationalized their defection from the floor of the House, insisting that the move was driven by genuine desire to attract federal government interventions to the constituencies, while some framed their decisions in terms of the infrastructural needs of their predominantly rural communities, saying the defection was a choice made by the constituents and not personal. That’s a lie from the bottom pit of hell!
The reality, however, was that every one of those defectors understood that party internal crisis and dwindling electoral fortunes made remaining on its platform suicidal.
Nemesis finally caught up with them while snoring expecting a cheap platform for reelection. That gamble has backfired spectacularly for them. Their desire to return to parliament in 2027 under the APC banner was extinguished at the party’s primaries, as they were defeated by candidates with deeper roots in the APC’s existing structure while some were not even allowed participation in the primaries.
The suffering of those defectors was mirrored, though in slightly different ways, by others who arrived, the APC colony full of confidence from the PDP. Ambitions of majority were derailed by the APC strategy of nailing them. Their dreams of contesting elective offices were crushed at the primary, while some were not lucky to present themselves to party members for the primary for being disqualified by the almighty APC hammer of horror. For them, the dream ended not in defeat at the polls but in rejection at the gate.
The APC strategy against the daylight defectors is a sobering reminder that a ruling party’s structure, built over years of patronage, loyalty, and grassroots organization, does not simply open its doors to newcomers because they arrive bearing the credentials of either sitting legislators or influential persons that may eventually take over the party. In the brutal arithmetic of APC internal politics, incumbency in parliament carries less weight than incumbency within the party itself.
The broader implications of these developments are significantly worsened by a legislative amendment that affected lawmakers themselves helped to enact. Section 77(4) of the new Electoral Act mandates political parties to submit a digital register detailing the names, genders, dates of birth, addresses, states, local governments, wards, polling units, National Identification Numbers (NIN) and photographs of members to INEC not later than 21 days before the fixed date for their primaries. INEC set May 10, 2026, as the deadline for submission of digital registers ahead of the 2027 cycle. This was later vacated by an Abuja Federal High Court.
The practical effect of this provision is that the window for defection by any participant in any primary election is now firmly closed. The irony of lawmakers who actively supported passage of the amendment have now found themselves trapped by its provisions.
With the defection window closed and APC tickets gone, the affected defectors now find themselves in a uniquely uncomfortable political limbo. Political analysts say they are essentially left with two unattractive options: remaining within the APC as mere onlookers and laughing stock for future reference while supporting candidates who defeated or rigged them out, or deploying their residual influence and resources against the party as a form of political retribution. Neither path leads back to success.
The third weak option involves lobbying APC’s National Working Committee (NWC) to invoke its powers and override primary election results in constituencies where they believe the process was compromised, a strategy that several of the aggrieved members are reported to be silently pursuing through back doors that may yield no positive result than waste of resources.
The story of those defectors is, in many ways, a parable of the extraordinary political turbulence that has characterized Nigeria since 2023. Swept into political offices by determination and commitment of the constituents they did not build, they abandoned the constituents at moment of crisis, sought shelter in a party founded and nurtured by others for a specific reason at variance with national interest, and now discarded. Their predicament will do little to discourage future acts of political nomadism in a system where loyalty has rarely been rewarded and betrayal seldom punished. But as of now, in the cold aftermath of the APC primaries, they are a cautionary tale of what happens when a politician mistakes a borrowed wave for a foundation.
APC needed numerical strength to fight strong opposition parties. It introduced several deceitful mechanisms that paid. Those who abandoned their natural habitats to squat in an already crowded open space full of bedbugs and poisonous insects have finally met their political Waterloo in Tinubu’s colony. They are not to be pitied but to be laughed at for greed and fear out of cowardice. It is better to die a celebrated warrior than a conquered slave!
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues.
