An ex-governor in Gombe State rejected the results of the APC primary election in his senatorial district this week, calling them fake. On the same day, another APC primary in Delta State produced a winner that local party structures apparently did not expect. These are not isolated complaints from sore losers. They are symptoms of a party machine that has stopped pretending to run democratic processes and now simply awards tickets to whoever has the right connections or money.
The APC came to power in 2015 as a coalition that claimed to represent change. It won because Nigerians were exhausted by the PDP's rot. Twelve years later, the APC has become indistinguishable from what it replaced. The party's primary elections are theater, not selection. The outcomes are determined before voting happens, and when they are not, the results are changed afterward. This is not the opinion of one disgruntled politician. The pattern is visible across multiple states.
Consider what is actually happening. In Gombe, someone with real political standing in the state rejected the primary results as fraudulent. He did not do this quietly. He publicly called for calm while making clear he does not accept what the party declared. In Delta, a candidate named Dafinone defeated Omo-Agege, a sitting senator and lieutenant governor with significant resources. Within hours, there were questions about whether the results would hold. These are not technical disputes about vote counting. They are fundamental questions about whether the primary process has any meaning at all.
Someone defending the APC would say that every party has internal struggles, that losing candidates always claim foul play, and that the party has mechanisms to resolve disputes. This is technically true. The APC does have dispute resolution procedures. But procedures have value only if they are applied fairly and if people believe they will be applied fairly. When results are announced and then quietly changed, when party officials in Abuja override results from state voting, when the same pattern repeats across multiple states, the procedures become a means of legitimizing predetermined outcomes, not resolving genuine disputes.
The problem here is not that the APC is worse than the PDP or that Nigerians should punish them at the ballot box by voting for the opposition. The problem is systemic. Both major parties run primary elections this way. Both treat tickets as products to be allocated rather than prizes to be earned. Both have central leadership that overrides state-level democratic processes. The APC is simply more visible about it right now because it is the party in power, and power amplifies visibility.
What makes this moment particular is that we are now two years from the 2027 general election. The primary process is supposed to select the candidates who will represent these parties. In a functioning democracy, that process would matter enormously. It would be where party members exercise real choice, where diverse voices within the party compete, where leadership is genuinely tested. Instead, it is a process where the outcome is negotiated in back rooms and announced at the stadium.
The damage this causes is deeper than simply unfair primaries. It means that candidates who win elections do so without having passed through any process of democratic selection. They were chosen by party leadership, announced as winners, and then elected because they had the party machinery behind them. This creates a class of politicians with no genuine connection to their constituents, no experience of having to earn support through persuasion or performance, and no accountability to anyone except the people who handed them the ticket. It is a system designed to produce mediocrity in elected office.
What should happen is straightforward. The APC should announce that primary elections will be conducted fairly and transparently, that results will not be changed after voting, and that any disputes will be resolved through open processes, not closed ones. This will not happen. The party benefits from the current system. The people in charge of primary elections have no incentive to make them democratic.
So what will likely happen is more of what we are seeing now. More rejected results. More public disputes. More quiet reversals. More candidates taking offices they did not genuinely win through democratic processes. And more Nigerian voters concluding that the electoral system is a fixed game that has nothing to do with their preferences or voices.
The responsibility for fixing this lies with the parties themselves, particularly the APC, which is currently conducting these primaries. If the party leadership valued the legitimacy that comes from actually democratic selection, they would institute real reforms. They would accept results even when they were surprised by them. They would allow candidates to lose. They would create space for genuine competition.
But they will not, because the system works for them. The question for Nigerians is whether they will continue to participate in a process that offers no real choice. That is the question the rejected primary results in Gombe and Delta have raised.
OduViews represents the editorial opinion of OduNews.
