“April showers bring May flowers.” This climatic-cum-horticultural English proverb is significant for Nigeria’s developing political story. Incidentally, we’re currently in the April-May weather nexus, and the proverb is metaphorically relevant for the current state of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
The party was formed on 6 February, 2013 from a merger of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), General Muhammadu Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), and part of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). Thereafter, a group of members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) called “New PDP”, including former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, defected to APC.
In this column on 17 November, 2024, in an article titled “Nigeria’s somnolent opposition,” it was shown how the country’s opposition parties seemed to have been in slumber due to, among other reasons, the victory of APC in the 28 March, 2015 presidential elections. Now, it seems that the opposition have woken up, but have done so on the wrong side of the bed, resulting in their befogged perception of the state of the nation’s politics.
This befuddlement is manifested in the tendency to see the opposition’s different woes as caused by malevolent agents of the ruling APC. So, rather than face their own demons, the opposition and their sympathisers have been blaming APC for striving to create a one-party state. Even the Social Democratic Party, which is itself already receiving defectors, has joined the opposition bandwagon of offloading their problems on to the APC.
Ironically, it has been APC’s President Tinubu who, since 18 December, 2023, has been making widely-acknowledged efforts to resolve the crisis between the PDP’s Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister Nyesom Wike, the PDP’s now-suspended Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State, and the suspended PDP legislature. Moreover, Wike said in a media parley on 18 April, 2025: “Two governors under APC … came to talk to me, and I said, ‘Look, I’m not the governor, I’m FCT Minister. … I said, look, I’m here for peace. What does he [Fubara] want? … And they said, ‘We’ll do everything to make [peace happen].’”
According to Britannica, a one-party state is “a country where a single political party controls the government, either by law or in practice. Examples of one-party states include North Korea, China, Eritrea, and Cuba.” With the constitution declaring the country as a multiparty democracy, with the multiplicity of parties in the nation’s legislatures and with multifarious parties running different states and local governments, Nigeria is neither a one-party state by law nor in practice, and its prospects of becoming one are farfetched. Indeed, the current unfettered, publicly-dramatised attempts to cobble together an opposition coalition to wrest power from APC in 2027 are inconsistent with the movement towards a one-party state.
April 2025’s dizzying torrent of defections to APC from different opposition parties show that, as the English proverb says, “It never rains but it pours.” And the one-party phantom in the country seems to be the escapist excuse of politicians who have shirked their responsibility for stabilising, reforming or rebuilding their parties, but who still want to sleep easy. The accusation of working to establish a one-party state is also a ready weapon in the arsenal of APC’s political detractors, and has become a self-deluding form of political denigration.
For some, the motive for defecting is the attraction of being part of the winning team; for some it is the desire to benefit from inducement; for some it is the need to seek refuge; and for some, it is primarily existential, with respect to the survival of their political careers. The conflict bedeviling the different opposition parties are of importance in this regard, especially concerning those who look forward to contesting elections into executive or legislative offices between now and 2027.
The Secretary of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) sent a reminder to political parties on the procedures for submitting nominations of candidates for the 2013 Anambra State governorship election as follows: “a) Every political party shall submit the list of the candidates the party proposes to sponsor in Form CF 002 duly signed by the National Chairman and National Secretary of the Political Party. b) The list shall be accompanied with a covering letter duly signed by the National Chairman and National Secretary of the Political Party.”
As Nyesom Wike alerts, these subsisting INEC procedures put at risk of improper nomination a candidate in whose party there is controversy about who the legitimate National Chairman or National Secretary is. And this is not speculative, as was shown in the relatable Zamfara State APC crises of the recent past. Some members of the party successfully challenged in court the legitimacy of all of the party’s candidates for all of the positions for which they contested, on the ground of improper nomination.
This is the way the Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room reported the matter on 28 May, 2019: “After a protracted legal tussle, the Supreme Court Friday, 24th May 2019, delivered a judgment nullifying the victory of all Candidates of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Zamfara State in the 2019 General elections. APC Candidates who had been declared winners of thirty-six elective positions in the State, comprising the Governorship, National and State Assembly positions have lost their seats to Candidates of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), who were the first runners-up in the elections. Describing the votes scored by APC in the State as a waste, the Court held that the party did not conduct primaries in Zamfara State and as such, could not field Candidates in the General elections.”
In an 8 May, 2025 interview on TVC News, the Leader of the Labour Party Caucus in the House of Representatives, Hon. Afam Ogene, noted with respect to defectors from his party: “And why are they defecting? They are not sure that the Labour Party offers a credible platform to run elections and sustain it. They don’t want a situation [as] happened in Plateau State to happen where they will go for primaries, campaign, win elections, only to be told by the courts that this man has been long thrown overboard as Chairman of the party. And that is why they are seeking their political fortunes elsewhere.” For this, you can’t blame the receiving or ruling party. Even babies don’t spit out honey.
Considering the gale of defections into APC, the Acting National Chairman of PDP – Ambassador Umar Damagum – and PDP chief Segun Sowunmi warn that APC faces the risk of implosion. Though this counsel comes from opposition sources that cannot easily be said to wish APC well, it is invaluable in the sense that it nudges the party not to lose sight of the fact that even dry land may be slippery. Another Yoruba idiom similarly admonishes: “Acquiring too many friends leads to acquiring treacherous friends.” (“Àyànjù òré tíí mú’ni yan èké.”). It is also believed that the size of the head determines the intensity of its headache. (“Bí orí bá se tóbi tó níí se fó olórí.”) The message here is that grace has pains.
This brings us to the APC’s Oyo State sore thumb. Oyo State was a solid APC domain. Its troubles in the state started with what some members regarded as the imposition of governorship candidate for the 2019 election. Taking offence at what was believed to be this perverse treatment, some of the other aspirants defected to other parties, and some stayed on but worked against the party. Consequently, APC lost the gubernatorial election to PDP in the state that year.
History repeated itself in APC’s primary elections for the 2023 elections. The primaries were believed to have been grossly manipulated and some disaffected candidates and members of the party defected from the party. Some even contested the elections on the platform of other parties. Some of those who did not defect worked against the party from within. So, with this protest, complemented by PDP’s incumbency factor, APC lost the governorship election again. The 2027 governorship election would be the third consecutive one. Will APC work to lose again this time around? There’s already grumbling in the air, and APC needs to act right before the grumble becomes a rumble.
There is also the problem of the zonal dominance of source of governorship candidates in Oyo State. There are five geo-political zones in the state. These are: Oke-Ogun 1 (with Iseyin, Kajola, Iwajowa, and Itesiwaju Local Governments) and Oke-Ogun 2 (with Atisbo, Saki-West, Saki-East, Oorelope, Irepo and Olorunsogo Local Governments), Ogbomoso zone (with Ori-Ire, Ogbomoso North, Ogbomoso South, Surulere and Ogo Oluwa Local Governments), Oyo zone (with Atiba, Oyo West, Oyo East and Afijio Local Governments), Ibarapa zone (with Ibarapa North, Ibarapa East and Ibarapa Central Local Governments), and Ibadan zone (with Ido, Akinyele, Lagelu, Ibadan North, Ibadan North-East, Ibadan North-West, Ibadan South-East, Ibadan South-West, Egbeda, Ona Ara and Oluyole Local Governments).
Of these five zones, with the exception of Ogbomoso, all of the civilian governors of the present Oyo State, since its creation on 27 August, 1991, have hailed from the Ibadan zone. Oyo State Governor Seyi Makinde put this problem in perspective in a 15 April, 2025 Channels Television interview. Asked by Seun Okinbaloye which zone of Oyo State his successor would come from, he replied: “Politics is a game of numbers. … Still at this particular time, about almost 50% of the population of Oyo State is still domiciled within Ibadan.”
Governor Makinde continued: “However, well before I became a governor, I told them that the only way the governorship would leave Ibadan is when you have a governor that has performed excellently well, that has had the trust of the people, and if he’s able to find a successor from any zone, then he can push that through. We’re still on this journey. I don’t know if we have … 100% trust from people just yet, but if we focus on what we’re doing, by the end of this year, we will definitely hear what people are saying.”
Propositions have been made for a constitutional review to stipulate the rotation of presidential candidacy between the different zones of the country, governorship candidacy between the different senatorial districts of a state, and chairmanship candidacy between different parts of a local government. This is the time to give these equitable proposals impetus to facilitate the accommodation of diversity, boost faith in the political system and enhance socio-political stability.
As has been shown in Nigeria and Botswana, dominant parties don’t last in ascendancy out of sheer size. They last due to methodical politics. Meanwhile, let APC, blessed with April showers of defection, continue to enjoy its May flowers – its increasing chances of victory in the 2027 elections.