No fewer than 150 members of the House of Representatives and scores of senators have officially switched political parties since the inauguration of the 10th National Assembly in June 2023, with the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) emerging as the overwhelming beneficiary of the mass defections that have fundamentally altered the balance of power in both chambers of the legislature.

Data from the House of Representatives confirmed that 137 defections were recorded in the chamber between July 2024 and May 2026 alone, with 16 members crossing party lines in the two weeks preceding the National Assembly primaries, underscoring the relentless and accelerating pace of a phenomenon that is systematically dismantling opposition representation in the Green Chamber.

The APC has been the single largest beneficiary of the realignments, gaining 103 seats from defections since July 2024, and expanding its overall majority in the 360-seat chamber to approximately 282 members.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has suffered the most grievous losses, surrendering 82 seats to other parties over the same period. The Labour Party, which entered the 10th Assembly with the historic momentum of Peter Obi’s 2023 presidential campaign behind it, has lost 26 seats through defections, reducing what was briefly the most consequential third-party caucus in the chamber’s history to a shadow of its post-election strength.

The New Nigeria Peoples Party (NNPP) has lost 18 seats, the Young Progressives Party has lost three and even the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), historically resilient in its South East stronghold, has surrendered two seats to the defection tide.

The scale of the realignment becomes even more striking when set against the composition of the House immediately after the 2023 general elections.

The APC entered the 10th Assembly with a majority, but not an overwhelming one. The Labour Party had sent 35 members to the chamber, its best-ever performance, and a figure that briefly made it the most significant third force in the House’s history.

The PDP held a sizeable bloc of its own. Together, the opposition appeared numerically capable of offering genuine legislative resistance to the executive. Three years later, that prospect has been almost entirely extinguished, with defection data confirming what observers on the floor of the House have watched unfold in real time.

The most recent wave of 16 defections over a two-week period cut across the states of Imo, Kaduna, Kano, Kebbi, Lagos, Niger, Osun, Sokoto, Taraba, Yobe and Zamfara, reflecting a nationwide rather than regional pattern of realignment.

In this latest round, the African Democratic Congress (ADC) recorded the highest gains, adding eight members, followed by the APC with five. Notably, the APC’s Majority Caucus also recorded some losses, with three of its members joining parties within the Minority Bloc, suggesting that the defection dynamic, while overwhelmingly flowing in one direction, is not entirely one-sided.

The Accord Party has gained five seats overall since July 2024 and retained all of them, while the Action Peoples Party has similarly held its two gained seats, suggesting that smaller parties with clearer internal structures are proving more capable of retaining members once they arrive.

In the Senate, the most dramatic episode of realignment occurred in March 2026, when nine senators simultaneously abandoned their respective parties for the African Democratic Congress.

The group comprised of five PDP senators, namely Aminu Tambuwal, Mohammed Ogoshi Onawo, Binos Dauda Yaroe, Austin Akobundu and Lawal Adamu Usman, three Labour Party senators in the persons of Ireti Kingibe, Victor Umeh and Tony Nwoye, and APGA’s Enyinnaya Abaribe.

The coordinated nature of the single-day realignment pointed to a level of organisation and deliberateness that went well beyond individual lawmakers acting on personal grievances.

Earlier, Senate defections had reinforced the same pattern, with Ezenwa Onyewuchi and Ifeanyi Ubah crossing to the APC from the Labour Party and Young Progressives Party respectively; three Kebbi State senators, Adamu Aliero, Yahaya Abdullahi and Garba Maidoki, moving en bloc from the PDP to the ruling party; and Seriake Dickson of Bayelsa West departing the PDP for the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC).

The stated justification offered by defecting lawmakers across both chambers has been remarkably consistent; protracted internal leadership crises and factionalisation within minority parties have made their former political homes untenable.

The PDP, Labour Party, NNPP and APGA have all been convulsed by internal disputes of varying severity since 2023. Critics, however, argue that the pattern of defections is too coordinated and too consistently beneficial to the ruling party to be explained by opposition dysfunction alone, pointing to the well-documented role of executive patronage in sustaining the defection pipeline.

The distribution of federal projects, appointments and other state resources to constituencies whose lawmakers align with the ruling party creates material incentives for crossing the aisle that no amount of civic exhortation is likely to overcome.

The Social Democratic Party remains the only party represented at the inauguration of the 10th Assembly that has not lost a single member through defection, a distinction that speaks to whatever combination of internal cohesion, leadership quality and member satisfaction has kept its caucus intact while those around it have crumbled.

The consequences of this sustained attrition have been visible in the conduct of the 10th Assembly’s legislative business.

The swift and largely uncontested approval of President Tinubu’s loan requests, the controversial endorsement of a state of emergency in Rivers State through a voice vote that constitutional lawyers say bypassed the requirement for a two-thirds majority, and the routine passage of executive-sponsored legislation with minimal scrutiny have all been facilitated by an opposition too numerically weakened and politically demoralised to mount sustained resistance.

The defection wave has also produced its own casualties. Several lawmakers who abandoned the Labour Party and PDP for the APC in anticipation of smoother passage to re-election discovered at the party’s House primaries in May 2026 that the ruling party’s internal structures were no more hospitable to newcomers than the parties they left, with former Labour Party members Sunday Umeha, Akiba Bassey, Esosa Iyawe, Daniel Asama, Ajang Afred, Ngozi Okolie, Umezuruike Munachim and Mathew Donatus among those whose 2027 ambitions were extinguished at the primary stage.

The legal framework designed to curtail serial defection has proven inadequate to the scale of the problem. Section 77(4) of the amended Electoral Act, which mandated parties to submit a digital register of members to INEC no later than 21 days before the date fixed for primaries, effectively closed the window for further defections ahead of the 2027 elections when the 10th May 2026 deadline passed.

The provision, intended to impose discipline on the revolving door of party membership, was actively supported by many of the same lawmakers now trapped by its consequences.

Political analysts and constitutional scholars who on the issue were unanimous in warning that a legislature in which one party commands more than four-fifths of available seats is functionally incapable of performing its constitutional oversight role, and that without robust anti-defection legislation carrying genuine enforcement mechanisms, the damage being inflicted on Nigeria’s legislative democracy will outlast the current assembly and shape the character of every National Assembly that follows it. (The Sun)

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