The raging storm that engulfed the All Progressives Congress (APC), before and after its primary elections to select candidates for next year’s general election, appears to be subsiding gradually, following the successful uploading of the party’s presidential and National Assembly candidates to the dedicated portal of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

But the calm on the surface conceals months of turmoil that have left the party’s national secretariat in Abuja largely deserted and its officials operating from undisclosed locations amid deep internal division.

Although the ruling party sounded boastful after meeting the deadline to upload the details of its flag-bearers, thereby putting to rest confusion over winners and losers, particularly around the fiercely contested National Assembly seats and the status of the vice presidential candidate, the process leading up to that point was, for many aspirants, months of agony, apprehension, depression and psychological torment. Those who took part in the primary exercise were subjected to harrowing experiences while they waited for the Presidency, the party’s national leadership and the Primary Elections Appeal Committee to reconcile the outcome of the actual voting with the appeal committee’s own findings.

It was a period of anxious uncertainty, intriguing speculation, horse trading, high-level scheming, lobbying and peaceful and violent protests at state and national levels. It was a period that consumed a sitting governor in Rivers State, denying him the chance to secure the ticket to seek re-election, and one that triggered a cataclysmic battle between political rivals and godfathers that threatened to shake the ruling party to its foundations.

Curiously, the national secretariat of the ruling party, which ought to have been the theatre of this war, has instead become its greatest casualty, remaining a ghost enclave, a shadow of its usual bustling self, since the conclusion of the primary elections for next year’s polls.

This is not without precedent. The desertion of the ruling party’s headquarters after major primaries has happened before, though never on this scale since the APC took over the reins of government in 2015, when the late former President Muhammadu Buhari defeated then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan. In previous election cycles, the party’s national headquarters was typically a beehive, with members thronging the premises for peaceful and sometimes violent protests, or simply to pay thank-you visits to the national leadership in appreciation of one favour or another. Either way, the secretariat would always wear the mood of a ruling party that had successfully concluded a crucial stage of its electoral timetable.

Not even during the era of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole as national chairman, when much of the party’s activity was relocated to a private residence on Aso Drive in Abuja, did the national headquarters fall into the kind of dormancy and abandonment it has experienced since the conclusion of this year’s primaries.

The reality today is that the national secretariat has, for months, been devoid of any serious activity, fuelling speculation that National Chairman, Prof Nentawe Goshwe Yilwatda, and members of his National Working Committee have quietly diverted post-primary business to various locations where they have temporarily relocated. The situation has become so dire that secretariat staff have resorted to carrying confidential official files outside the building simply to track down officers willing to append their signatures to documents.

Those officers, however, appear to have learnt from history, choosing not to take the risks their predecessors took in 2019 and 2023, when protesters barricaded the secretariat’s gate and officials had to scale the fence or slip away in tinted cars to escape angry crowds. Sources say that, perhaps rattled by intense pressure from disgruntled and shortchanged aspirants, the party’s leadership erred on the side of caution, relocating its operational base first to the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja, where it functioned only skeletally, before shifting more recently to another undisclosed location, reportedly due to concerns over the porosity of the five star hotel as a secure base.

Keen observers attribute this pattern of behaviour to fears of a possible breakdown in security at the secretariat, given the number of aspirants nursing deep wounds of betrayal after losing out in the primaries through what they view as the actions, and inactions, of major stakeholders working in concert with state governors. While some party officials have attributed the abandonment of the secretariat to other commitments, including the inspection of APC executed projects across the Federal Capital Territory, the persistent inactivity cannot, Daily Sun understands, be divorced from the bitterness and fallout of a shoddily managed primary process.

From the bitter outcome of primaries conducted across the country, where many stakeholders still feel deeply wronged, to the widening cracks within the APC Progressive Governors Forum, PGF, the ruling party is, by several accounts, still bleeding from the consequences of its own primary elections. Secretariat staff say national officers have largely confined themselves to skeletal operations, receiving only a handful of visitors and preferring to conduct serious business away from the headquarters. On the rare occasions the national chairman has visited the secretariat, he has typically left in haste after receiving dignitaries on courtesy calls or addressing protesting party members, always accompanied by a heavily fortified security detail.

The scale of the dysfunction became starkly apparent when newly re-elected Ekiti State governor Biodun Oyebanji was unable to visit the national secretariat to perform the customary ceremonial presentation of his certificate of return, a long-standing tradition within the party.

While some observers link the anomie at the secretariat to the uneasy calm within the PGF and the party leadership’s handling of the post-primary fallout, many others believe the situation would not have deteriorated to this extent had it not been for the far-reaching implications of the amended Electoral Act, which barred aspirants from contesting primaries under more than one political party.

Among those who hold this view is Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, National Publicity Secretary of the African Democratic Congress, ADC, who, speaking exclusively to Daily Sun, described the APC as the architect of its own misfortune. He argued that the ruling party had set what it believed was a bumpy trap intended to frustrate opposition parties when it spearheaded the adoption of either consensus or direct primaries across board, only to fall squarely into the very snare it had designed for others.

“I am not surprised by the crisis in the APC as a result of the fallout of the primary elections,” Abdullahi said. “The APC set a trap for the opposition when they insisted on either consensus or direct mode of primaries. They thought they set a trap for us, but they fell into their own trap. They are the biggest victim of their own trap. They felt that they could use the power of incumbency to force and muscle people. We didn’t have that power, so we went to conduct primaries, and Nigerians can see that we, at least, don’t have as many issues. Yes, aggrieved stakeholders protested, but we don’t have issues as worrisome as the APC.”

He went further, mocking the ruling party’s predicament. “The APC is now caught in a web of major crisis, and I am very, very glad to see what has happened. When they started that Electoral Act, we won the National Assembly against surrendering their political survival to President Tinubu.

But they instead started begging him then to give them their mandate back so that all of them will have an automatic ticket. They no longer think that their political survival is in the hands of the people that voted for them in the first place. They placed their survival in the hands of the President. They forgot that when they do that, they disempowered themselves. We warned them to be very careful with that Electoral Act, and not to do anything that will kill the opposition, but they were very busy singing, on your mandate we shall stand. But now they are no longer able to stand on any mandate. They have collapsed on the mandate,” he said.

True to Abdullahi’s assessment, grievances arising from the legislative primaries have proved to be the ruling party’s single biggest headache. Strikingly, while the national leadership outrightly disqualified several aspirants, including sitting legislators, from contesting the primaries altogether, it went further to substitute a number of candidates who had already emerged winners, citing the recommendations of its Primary Election Appeal Committee. The final list of disqualified and replaced candidates forwarded to INEC includes seven senatorial candidates and nineteen House of Representatives candidates who had originally emerged victorious during primaries conducted in May.

Although the party’s leadership has pinned the reason for these changes squarely on the Appeal Committee’s report, the reality on ground, according to sources, is that many of the affected candidates were casualties of a fierce power struggle between competing blocs within the party, comprising state governors, party chieftains and forces aligned with the presidency.

States including Kogi, Abia, Benue, Taraba, Ondo, Niger, Kwara, Kaduna and Ebonyi were among the worst affected, largely as a result of clashes between the presidency, federal appointees and their respective state governors.

In official correspondence sent to INEC and co-signed by National Chairman Yilwatda and National Secretary Ajibola Basiru, the party sought to justify the changes. “We write to formally forward the attached list of the party’s candidates for the affected senatorial and House of Representatives candidates constituencies arising from the report of the Primary Election Appeal Committee,” the letter read.

“Following the determination of appeals from the recently concluded primary elections, the Reports of the Appeal Committee were reviewed and subsequently considered and approved by NWC of the APC as the party’s final position on the affected constituencies. In accordance with the Electoral Act 2022, as amended, and INEC’s regulations and guidelines, we hereby transmit the enclosed list of the approved candidates for seven senatorial districts and nineteen House of Representatives constituencies for your records and necessary action. Please accept the assurance of our highest regards.”

However, seeking to dispel any notion that the fallout from the primaries has left the party fractured, National Publicity Secretary Felix Morka insisted that the process, though painful for some, remained entirely legitimate.

“Primary election is a process not an event,” Morka said. “What takes place in the field on the day of primary is just a part of the process that started with the sale of expression of interest and nomination forms, screening, and so on. We have the appeal process after the primaries established at the same time with the Primary Election Committee. It is usually populated by individuals carefully chosen by the party’s leadership for that purpose. We understand that people will be dissatisfied with the outcome of the elections and have the right to a recourse procedure to challenge what may have happened. That appeal process is an integral part of the primary election process, not a separate process. It is not also a process invented by the party to cause mischief but a process embedded in the constitution and guidelines of the party to enable those that participated in the process to seek remedy where they feel some irregularities occurred which prevented them from succeeding in that election.”

He continued: “Yes, names may have been declared as winners in some areas after the primaries, which is valid. However, when those that lost out petitioned the Appeal Committee, that process is also valid, and that is what happened in our case. We received over 720 petitions from the contestants in the primaries. The Appeal Committee reviewed the petitions and made recommendations to the NWC, which, in its wisdom, took responsibility as the ultimate duty bearer to review the Appeal Committee report and reevaluate the cases, and at the end made those changes allegedly causing problem. These are legitimate outcomes of our primaries, not any form of mischief.”

Although the ruling party has consistently played down the intrigue that ultimately led President Tinubu and the party to announce Kashim Shettima as the vice presidential candidate, the fallout of the primary elections remains a ghost that continues to haunt it. Yet Morka insists the party faces no existential threat. “I am not aware that those that the Appeal Panel recommended, that those that did not participate in the primary, were handed tickets as candidates of our party,” he said.

However, the party’s leadership chooses to frame the situation, what appears incontrovertible is that many aggrieved, founding and loyal members of the party now harbour deep resentment likely to manifest during the general election itself. “This is the nature of election contestation,” Morka acknowledged.

“When multiple people compete in an election, every contestant goes into it hoping to win. Yes, they are party members and supporters that spent money, they have high expectations that they will win, and when they don’t, naturally the losers have reasons to be dissatisfied. That is why we took our time to meticulously go through the appeal processes to ensure that we considered every case according to its merit. Our conflict management systems are activated already to reassure such individuals like them that nobody has been favoured with the ticket. The good thing is that the number of substitutions is very insignificant, about four per cent of the total number of participants. The other 96 per cent were successful.”

Regardless of how pessimists choose to view the situation, Morka remained defiant in his message to what he described as prophets of doom within and outside the party. “The beautiful thing about the APC is that we have a lot of titans across so many states that command a lot of influence, respect and followership determined to back the fortunes of the party in their states,” he said. “The competition for our state is very high. This may appear to certain persons as indicating a problem, but to us, it shows that our party is vibrant and its leaders committed to the progress of our party.” (The Sun)

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