Senators and governorship aspirants within the All Progressives Congress in Kwara State publicly rejected the results of recent internal party primaries on Wednesday, demanding urgent reconciliation from the party’s national leadership and warning that unresolved grievances could damage the APC’s prospects in the 2027 general elections.
Multiple APC figures in Kwara said the primaries were conducted in a manner that excluded genuine party members from participating, alleging that results were manipulated to favour pre-selected candidates connected to the state’s party leadership. They called on APC National Chairman Abdullahi Ganduje and other senior party officials to intervene before the dispute deepened the rift between various APC factions in the state.
Kwara Dispute Mirrors Wider APC Pattern
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The Kwara situation mirrors a pattern seen in several other states following the APC’s recent National Assembly primaries, where allegations of governorship interference, result manipulation, and exclusion of legitimate aspirants emerged in Lagos, Plateau, Borno, and Ekiti. The combination of individual defections and collective rejections of primary outcomes suggests the APC faces a systemic internal democracy challenge rather than isolated cases.
President Tinubu met National Assembly leaders earlier in June specifically to address post-primary friction, but no formal resolution was publicly announced following that meeting. Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq of Kwara State, who commands significant influence in the state’s party structure, had not issued a formal response to the senators’ demands by Wednesday evening.
2027 Stakes Raise the Pressure
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Furthermore, Kwara State is expected to be a competitive electoral battlefield in 2027, making internal party unity especially critical for the APC’s prospects. The senatorial and governorship elections in the state will test both the party’s organisational strength and its ability to reconcile competing interests after a contentious primaries season. Notably, civil society groups monitoring Nigerian political parties said internal democracy failures in the primary process were a leading cause of party fragmentation heading into general election cycles. Consequently, the Kwara APC crisis reinforces the argument that Nigeria’s parties must reform their internal processes if they are to remain viable democratic institutions rather than vehicles for elite interest negotiation.
