The All Progressives Congress’ controversial primaries have exposed troubling cracks beneath its growing political dominance, raising deeper questions about democratic credibility, elite power, and President Bola Tinubu’s quiet posture ahead of 2027. Adedayo Adejobi reports.
At first glance, the All Progressives Congress appears to be marching toward 2027 with formidable confidence. With Governors who defected in droves into its orbit, federal power remains firmly within its grasp. Opposition parties appear fractured, distracted, and ideologically exhausted.
From Abuja, the optics suggest momentum, expansion, and consolidation.
Yet politics, especially in Nigeria, has always possessed a dangerous habit of disguising instability as strength.
The louder the celebration at the surface, the more necessary it becomes to listen carefully for the cracks underneath.
Across much of the country last week, the APC primaries were expected to serve as a demonstration of organisational discipline and electoral readiness ahead of the next political cycle. Instead, they revealed something far more troubling, a party increasingly struggling to reconcile its enormous political power with the basic democratic obligations required to sustain legitimacy.
Reports emerging from several APC controlled states painted a deeply uncomfortable picture. Delayed exercises, parallel congresses, candidate substitutions, allegations of imposition, manipulated consensus arrangements, protests by aggrieved aspirants, and accusations that in some constituencies no meaningful voting process took place at all, combined to produce an atmosphere less reflective of democratic competition and more suggestive of administrative choreography.
In parts of the North Central and South South, aspirants openly rejected announced outcomes. In sections of the South West, murmurs of predetermined lists circulated long before delegates assembled. Across multiple states, complaints surfaced that governors and entrenched party figures had transformed internal contests into carefully managed coronations.
None of this is entirely unfamiliar within Nigerian politics. Internal party democracy has long existed more as aspiration than consistent practice. Yet what distinguished the latest APC primaries was not merely the scale of the irregularities, but the growing normalisation of them. That distinction matters.
Ruling parties often assume that electoral dominance automatically translates into political stability. History suggests otherwise. Sometimes the most dangerous phase for a governing party begins precisely when it becomes too powerful to tolerate internal dissent and too insulated to recognise public disillusionment. This is where the APC must tread carefully.
APC’s expanding political influence may ultimately conceal a more fragile internal reality. Beneath the surface triumph lies a widening atmosphere of quiet resentment among party loyalists, displaced aspirants, grassroots mobilisers, and ordinary supporters who increasingly feel excluded from meaningful participation.
Political resentment rarely announces itself immediately. It accumulates silently. Then one day it arrives all at once.
Former President Goodluck Jonathan encountered a similar phenomenon in 2015. Surrounded by loyalists, insulated by optimistic briefings, and reassured by carefully curated political intelligence, his administration failed to recognise how deeply public frustration had matured beneath the surface. By the time the warning signs became impossible to ignore, the coalition sustaining his power had already weakened internally.
The lesson was brutal. Political danger rarely arrives dramatically at first. It begins quietly, among trusted allies, compromised structures, and institutional complacency.
President Bola Tinubu now faces his own version of that historical crossroads.
The President’s political instincts are widely respected, even by opponents. Few figures in contemporary Nigerian politics understand coalition building, elite negotiation, and long-term strategic positioning better than Tinubu. Yet leadership also requires attentiveness to the symbolic dimensions of power, particularly during moments when democratic credibility appears under strain.
It is here that the President’s recent public posture has generated increasing concern.
Amid widespread reports of irregularities surrounding the APC primaries, the Presidency has projected an unusually detached and restrained body language. There has been little visible urgency, little rhetorical intervention, and little indication that the leadership of the ruling party appreciates the deeper institutional implications of the growing dissatisfaction.
Silence, in politics, is rarely neutral.
For supporters, it can appear reassuring. For critics, it can resemble indifference. For undecided observers, especially younger Nigerians already sceptical of political institutions, it risks creating the impression that anti-democratic practices are gradually becoming acceptable instruments of political management within the ruling establishment. That perception carries consequences extending beyond partisan politics.
Nigeria remains Africa’s largest democracy and one of its most closely watched political environments. International investors, development institutions, diplomats, multinational firms, technology innovators, and governance observers study the country not merely for economic opportunity, but for signals about institutional stability and democratic maturity.
Political systems do not lose credibility only through military coups or constitutional collapse. Sometimes credibility erodes gradually through repeated public exposure to manipulated processes, elite capture, weakened internal accountability, and the slow suffocation of competitive participation.
The danger is particularly acute for ruling parties that become excessively dependent on governors and elite consensus brokers. Across several African democracies, incumbency has increasingly evolved into a system where political structures are managed from above, while democratic rituals continue largely for symbolic legitimacy. The result is often institutional exhaustion.
Parties grow larger but weaker internally. Political participation narrows. Public trust declines. Talented younger actors withdraw from formal politics altogether. Eventually, governance itself begins to suffer because systems built primarily around loyalty rarely encourage innovation, competence, or intellectual diversity. Nigeria cannot afford that trajectory.
The APC, more than any other political institution in the country today, carries a unique responsibility precisely because of its dominance. Strong ruling parties strengthen democracies only when they remain open enough to accommodate internal competition, credible dissent, and genuine participation. Once they become vehicles purely for elite preservation, decline often begins from within.
There are already warning signs.
Many of the politicians currently gravitating toward the APC are motivated less by ideological alignment than by political survival. That is not unusual in Nigeria. Yet such coalitions can become dangerously unstable because they are built not on shared conviction, but on proximity to power.
When access becomes the organising principle of politics, loyalty inevitably becomes transactional.
The President must therefore resist the temptation to interpret every defection, endorsement, or orchestrated show of support as evidence of long-term political security. Nigerian political history is littered with leaders who mistook temporary alignment for permanent loyalty.
Indeed, one of the great ironies of power is that the closer political actors move toward the centre, the harder it becomes to distinguish genuine allies from strategic opportunists.
What occurred during the APC primaries should therefore concern the President not merely because of immediate optics, but because of what it reveals about the evolving culture of governance around the ruling party. Systems that routinely suppress competition internally eventually struggle to inspire confidence externally.
Business communities understand this instinctively. Investors value predictability, transparency, and institutional credibility. Technology ecosystems thrive where merit, openness, and innovation are rewarded. Democratic legitimacy, much like market confidence, depends heavily on trust in process.
Once people begin to believe outcomes are predetermined, cynicism expands rapidly. This is why the current moment demands careful reflection from the Presidency.
Measured intervention from President Tinubu would not necessarily weaken the APC. On the contrary, it could strengthen the party’s long-term legitimacy by signaling that democratic credibility still matters within the ruling establishment. Leadership is not diminished by correcting excesses within one’s own political family. Often it is strengthened by it. The alternative is far riskier.
If internal dissatisfaction continues to deepen while public confidence continues to erode, the APC may eventually discover that political dominance and political stability are not the same thing. One can exist loudly at the surface while the other quietly deteriorates underneath.
That is the true danger now facing the ruling party. Not immediate collapse. Not a sudden rebellion. But the gradual construction of political minefields beneath an apparently triumphant structure.
And history, particularly African political history, has never been kind to leaders who mistake silence for stability.
