The APC presidential primary of Saturday, 23 May 2026, was presented as a direct primary. In substance, it looked like a coronation of President of Tinubu for second term
The APC presidential primary of Saturday, 23 May 2026, was presented as a direct primary. In substance, it looked like a coronation.
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was declared winner with 10,999,162 votes. His only challenger, Stanley Osifo, received 16,503 votes. The exercise was reportedly conducted across all 8,809 wards, with registered APC members expected to vote directly. The party said 11,015,665 votes were cast out of 12,643,316 registered members. That gives the APC an internal turnout of about 87.1 percent. That number should worry every serious student of Nigerian democracy.
In the 2023 presidential election, Tinubu won the presidency with 8,794,726 votes. That was from a national register of 93.47 million voters. The national turnout was only about 26.7 percent. Yet in this APC primary, Tinubu supposedly received 2.2 million more votes from party members alone than he received from the entire country in the election that made him president. This is the point at which common sense must enter the room.
Nobody is saying party members cannot be more enthusiastic than ordinary voters. They can. Party members are usually more committed, more organized, and more responsive to mobilization. But there is a difference between enthusiasm and fantasy. In a country where voter apathy has become a national disease, where the 2026 FCT Area Council election recorded only 14 percent voter turnout, the APC now wants Nigerians to believe that nearly nine out of every ten registered party members came out across the country for a primary whose outcome was already obvious. That is not democracy speaking. That is political theatre shouting too loudly.
The APC will say it complied with the Electoral Act. It may even be right in a narrow legal sense. The 2026 Electoral Act moved parties away from old-style indirect primaries and placed emphasis on direct primaries or consensus. But legality is not the same as credibility. A process can obey the law and still insult democracy. A coronation does not become a contest merely because ballot papers were printed.
The Stanley Osifo challenge did not rescue the credibility of the exercise. It weakened it. Osifo gave the APC the optics it needed. Without him, Tinubu’s emergence would have looked like a one-man affirmation. With him, the party could claim there was a contest. But what kind of contest produces a challenger who barely exists politically in the result?
PUNCH reported that Osifo later said he was “okay with the outcome” and would work with the party and its candidate. Even more revealing, he rejected the idea that he was truly challenging Tinubu, saying APC members were “one family” and were only deciding who would become candidate. That is honest, but it is also fatal to the democratic claim of the primary. If the only challenger did not even see himself as challenging the president, then what exactly did the APC conduct? The answer is simple. It conducted an affirmation ceremony with electoral decoration.
This is where Kayode Fayemi’s recent interview becomes important. Fayemi is not an opposition heckler. He is not a social media activist. He is not a bitter outsider throwing stones from the fence. He is a former APC governor of Ekiti State, a former minister, a founding figure in the party, and a man who has openly acknowledged his role in helping Tinubu become president. That is why his words matter.
In his interview on State Affairs with Edmund Obilo, Fayemi gave what should be treated as insider testimony. His most damning line was this: “This is not where the party has come from. We have lost our bearing and the vision of the founding fathers of this party.” That statement should be read beside Tinubu’s 10.9 million primary votes.
Fayemi’s warning tells us that the problem is bigger than one suspiciously inflated primary figure. The problem is that the APC appears to have lost the democratic culture that once gave it the language of reform, progressivism, and alternative politics. What is left now is power management. What is left is control. What is left is a ruling party confusing mass endorsement with democratic vitality.
Fayemi went further. Asked about intellectual life inside the APC, he said, “You don’t see intellectualism because there’s no debate in our party.” He also warned that the party’s 2023 victory was a minority win and that the APC should have responded with broader inclusion, not winner-takes-all politics.
That line cuts deep because it explains the primary perfectly. A party without debate does not produce real primaries. It produces acclamation. It produces loyalty tests. It produces managed outcomes. It produces numbers that are politically useful but democratically suspicious.
Fayemi’s testimony also exposes the danger of the new consensus culture in the APC. He did not reject consensus entirely. He said there is nothing wrong with genuine consensus. But that is the key word: genuine. Consensus that emerges from free persuasion is democratic. Consensus imposed by governors, party bosses, presidential handlers, and patronage networks is not consensus. It is elite capture.
That is why Fayemi’s warning about implosion matters. According to reports of the interview, he cautioned that those denied real competition would not be happy and that the party may be “waiting for an implosion.”
This is exactly the danger of the Tinubu primary. It may look neat today. It may please the president’s loyalists. It may allow the APC chairman to boast about nationwide strength. But beneath such manufactured unity often lies silent resentment. When debate dies, grievance goes underground. When competition is blocked, ambition does not disappear. It waits.
Fayemi also criticised the culture of everybody running to the (presidential) villa for endorsement and advantage. His words were sharp: “It would be unfortunate if everybody is running to Aso Rock because they want something.”
That is not a casual complaint. It is a diagnosis of presidential over-centralization inside the ruling party. It means the APC is no longer functioning as a democratic organization of members, tendencies, ideas, and competing visions. It is functioning as a power queue. People line up not to debate the future of Nigeria, but to secure access, favour, protection, tickets, and relevance. This is how ruling party’s decay.
First, they stop debating ideas. Then they stop tolerating dissent. Then they stop holding real primaries. Then they mistake obedience for unity. Finally, they begin to believe their own numbers.
The APC’s reaction to Fayemi proves his point. Rather than engage the substance of his criticism, the party’s national secretary, Ajibola Basiru, reportedly warned him against damaging the party’s image and suggested he could leave the party or face sanctions.
That response is more revealing than Fayemi’s interview. A party accused of lacking debate responded by threatening discipline. That is not internal democracy. That is political obedience culture.
This is why the 2026 APC presidential primary matters beyond the APC. Political parties are the gatekeepers of democracy. If they become hollow, the general election is already damaged before voters arrive at the polling unit. If candidates are imposed, affirmed, manufactured, or protected from challenge inside their parties, then citizens are forced to choose from options already filtered by elite convenience.
The APC primary shows us a ruling party where incumbency has swallowed competition. Tinubu was always going to win. That was not the issue. The issue is whether the party was willing to subject him to a real democratic contest. It was not.
A real primary would have allowed serious aspirants to enter the race without fear of political extinction. It would have allowed members to hear competing programs. It would have allowed debate on poverty, insecurity, inflation, federalism, electoral reform, corruption, state police, youth unemployment, and the cost of living. It would have forced Tinubu to defend his record before his own party members. Instead, Nigerians got a landslide that raised more questions than answers.
If the APC truly believes in the credibility of its 10.9 million votes, it should publish the full ward-by-ward results. It should publish accreditation figures, membership registers, turnout by state, voting locations, cancelled votes, reports from monitors, and the process used to verify voters. It should not hide behind ceremony. Democracy requires evidence.
Tinubu’s supporters may argue that the president’s overwhelming victory shows strength. That is the shallow reading. The deeper reading is that excessive numbers can become a liability when they do not match the political mood of the country. Nigerians are poor. Many are angry. Many are tired. Many feel abandoned. A primary that produces almost 11 million votes for an incumbent in the middle of national hardship does not automatically prove popularity. It may instead deepen suspicion that Nigeria’s ruling party has become too comfortable with political manufacture.
Fayemi’s interview gives this argument its strongest moral force. He is not saying what critics have not said before. But he is saying it from inside the house. When an insider says the party has lost its bearing, when he says there is no debate, when he warns of implosion, when he laments the rush to Aso Rock, he is not merely commenting on one primary. He is describing the sickness of a ruling party. That sickness now has a number: 10,999,162.
The APC can celebrate Tinubu’s nomination. That is its right. But Nigerians also have the right to ask whether the process was a democratic contest or a carefully arranged coronation. On the evidence available, the honest answer is uncomfortable. It was a coronation with ballot papers.
And if Nigeria continues to confuse such rituals with democracy, then 2027 may arrive with all the noise of an election, but without the soul of one.
Anthony Ubani is a leadership and governance expert. He currently serves as the Executive Director of #FixPolitics Africa
