The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) finds itself entangled in a legal contest largely of its own making, fighting on two fronts simultaneously. Having conducted primaries across the federation, the party’s National Working Committee moved to replace a considerable number of candidates before the final list reached the Independent National Electoral Commission, and in doing so triggered litigation from its own governors, aggrieved aspirants and rival interests within its ranks. All of it converges on a single, deceptively simple question.

Does the APC possess the legal latitude to rewrite the outcomes of its own primary elections, or has the party overstepped the boundaries the law has drawn around it? What began as internal grumbling among disappointed aspirants has since hardened into a full blown constitutional and statutory contest now before the Federal High Court, with INEC itself, remarkably, appearing to side against the very party it is meant to regulate with strict neutrality.

Records held by INEC show that a significant number of senatorial and House of Representatives candidates who emerged victorious in APC primaries conducted in May were subsequently substituted before the final list reached the commission. Aggrieved aspirants allege that these changes disproportionately favoured influential party leaders and senior political office holders, with some claiming that officials exploited the narrow window between the conclusion of primaries and the submission of names to alter the original outcomes in favour of preferred candidates.

The affected senatorial districts and constituencies span nine states, namely Abia, Benue, Ebonyi, Kaduna, Kogi, Kwara, Niger, Ondo and Taraba. Among the most prominent casualties are former Governor and Senator Gabriel Suswam, who had earlier emerged as the party’s candidate for Benue North East, and House member Gbenga Elegbeleye, previously the party’s flagbearer for Ondo North. The internal alarm reached the presidency early, with fourteen prominent APC stakeholders, including sitting senators and former lawmakers, appealing directly to President Tinubu and the National Working Committee to intervene in what they described as a deepening internal crisis threatening the party’s cohesion ahead of the general election.

The party has mounted a vigorous public defence. APC spokesman Felix Morka has stated that the National Working Committee received more than seven hundred and twenty petitions from aspirants following the primaries, all of which were reviewed by appeal committees before recommendations were forwarded for further evaluation and eventual approval.

Morka has rejected suggestions that tickets were handed to individuals who never participated in the process, insisting he is unaware of any instance where someone who neither purchased forms nor underwent screening was suddenly awarded a ticket, while conceding that losing aspirants naturally have cause for dissatisfaction. His central argument rests on procedure rather than substance, namely that a primary election constitutes an ongoing process rather than a single event, and that the appeal mechanism forms an integral part of that process rather than a device conjured to cause mischief.

Beyond the individual states affected, the party informed INEC that the changes to its National Assembly list stemmed from recommendations made by its Primary Election Appeal Committee following the resolution of various petitions, framing the revised list as its final position and citing compliance with the Electoral Act as amended. That citation may itself prove problematic, since the process is now governed by the Electoral Act of 2026 rather than its 2022 predecessor, a mismatch that critics suggest could become a vulnerability in its own right once tested before the courts.

Critics, however, counter that the appeal committee route is itself the fundamental problem. Legal practitioners and affected aspirants argue that the substitutions contravene Section 33 of the Electoral Act, which permits candidate changes only in cases of death or voluntary withdrawal, and that the process may separately breach the right to fair hearing guaranteed under Section 36 of the 1999 Constitution.

Roughly 26 six National Assembly candidates are said to be affected by this particular dispute, prompting development partners to caution INEC’s chairman against allowing internal party appeal committees to become a backdoor mechanism for rewriting primary outcomes after the fact. That caution has since crystallised into full litigation, with APC state governors approaching the Federal High Court, dragging both the National Working Committee and INEC into court over the substitution of the affected candidates nationwide and securing an interim injunction from Justice Ekwo in mid July.

In Benue and Ondo states, aggrieved candidates are separately seeking court orders restraining the party from substituting individuals they insist were validly nominated through the party’s own correspondence to INEC dated late June, with insiders warning that the suit could ultimately force fresh primaries or further changes to the candidate list ahead of 2027.

This substitution dispute unfolds against a considerably broader judicial backdrop concerning INEC’s own election timetable. Earlier in the year, Justice Umar voided the commission’s compressed deadlines, ruling that INEC cannot abridge the statutory one-hundred-and-twenty-day window for submitting candidate particulars, and that it similarly lacks the power to shorten the ninety-day period during which parties may withdraw and substitute candidates. Justice Omotosho separately ordered the commission to amend its timetable to conform with statutory requirements governing membership registers and candidate substitution.

The Court of Appeal, however, ruling on INEC’s own appeal, subsequently vacated the judgment that had nullified the commission’s 2027 timelines, adding yet another layer of procedural uncertainty to an already tangled legal picture.

In a suit marked before the Federal High Court, a group of aggrieved APC candidates from Benue State, understood to be loyalists of Governor Hyacinth Alia, commenced action against the party and INEC, with plaintiffs from Ondo State joining the same fight. The plaintiffs asked the court to determine whether the party could, through its June correspondence or any subsequent action, lawfully substitute validly nominated candidates absent voluntary withdrawal, death or disqualification, and sought a declaration that any such substitution be treated as null and void.

Before the substantive hearing could proceed, Justice Inyang Ekwo issued a preservative order directing all parties to maintain the status quo, holding that once issues had been formally joined before the court, the defendants were legally bound to preserve the subject matter in dispute, a position he described as a matter of law rather than mere advice.

The statutory provision at the centre of the dispute states plainly that a party may not change or substitute a submitted candidate except in cases of death or voluntary withdrawal, with a fresh primary required within a fortnight of any valid withdrawal. On its face, this represents the entirety of the plaintiffs’ case, since the National Working Committee’s appeal mechanism does not fall within either of the two statutory grounds provided.

Beyond this bare statutory point, the plaintiffs have layered a due process argument atop their claim, contending that overturning delegate certified, INEC monitored primary results through an internal appeal panel could offend the constitutional guarantee of fair hearing, since the original winners were displaced without any adversarial proceeding.

INEC’s position in this saga has proven unusual in the extreme. In an affidavit filed in early July, the commission threw its institutional weight behind the plaintiffs, informing the court that those named in the suit had genuinely emerged as winners of the commission monitored primaries in Benue but had subsequently been unlawfully substituted. Commission counsel argued that granting the plaintiffs’ application would serve the interest of justice and spare INEC needless litigation arising from unjustified substitutions, submitting further that the era in which political parties exercised unchecked discretion over candidate selection has long since passed, and that aspirants who emerge victorious in commission monitored primaries automatically become the party’s candidates for the relevant elections.

The plaintiffs draw considerable support from established Supreme Court authority holding that a claimant to a party’s candidacy must demonstrate victory in an INEC monitored primary, and that a party bears an obligation, admitting no discretion, to forward the name of the aspirant who scored the highest votes.

Yet, the precedent every lawyer in this dispute is watching most closely cuts both ways. A previous case involving a Senate primary in Yobe State saw the Federal High Court and Court of Appeal both side with the aggrieved aspirant, only for the Supreme Court to reverse in a narrowly split decision, not on the merits of who had actually won, but on a procedural technicality concerning the correct mode of commencing proceedings where allegations of fraud are involved.

The dissenting justices In that matter held firmly that the original winner had been lawfully nominated, reasoning that the party’s subsequent, uncancelled primary amounted to an unlawful duplicate. For the APC, the majority position offers a precedent that substitution can stand over the will of a certified primary on procedural grounds alone.

For the plaintiffs in the present dispute, the substantive reasoning contained in that dissent, that a party cannot informally override a lawfully conducted primary, was never rejected on its merits, only sidestepped on procedure, and remains, in their view, good law upon which to build.

Three distinct threads now converge to shape how this litigation will ultimately unfold. There is the statutory question of whether an internal appeal committee mechanism can lawfully substitute for the narrow grounds of death or withdrawal that the law provides. There is the procedural question of whether technicalities over the correct mode of commencing proceedings will once again determine the outcome on form rather than substance.

There is the institutional question of INEC’s unusually open alignment with the plaintiffs against a party it exists to regulate impartially, and what that alignment signals for how the commission intends to police substitutions in the run up to 2027.

With an interim injunction currently in place and the substantive suit yet to be heard, the fate of the APC’s candidate list for several National Assembly seats, and quite possibly the broader question of how much discretion political parties retain over their own primary processes, now rests squarely with the Federal High Court. (The Sun)

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