By Seun Faleye

There is an old truth that every student of politics eventually learns: a party that cannot manage its own household will struggle to convince the public it can manage a state. That is the uncomfortable lesson staring the All Progressives Congress in the face in Ogun State right now, as the battle between Senator Solomon Adeola, popularly called Yayi, and Hon. Abayomi Semako Hunye refuses to die down, even after the party’s leadership insists the matter is settled.

On the surface, the story looks simple. Yayi, a senator with deep pockets and long-standing federal connections, emerged from the APC primary as the man to face the PDP’s LadiAdebutu in 2027. The party has told INEC as much, submitting his name alongside his running mate, KudiratBalogun. Case closed, one would think. But politics, especially in Ogun State, is rarely that tidy.

Hunye has refused to accept that the matter is over. His grievance is not that he lost a straightforward contest fair and square. His argument, and it is one that deserves to be taken seriously rather than dismissed as sour grapes, is that the process itself was compromised before it even began. He says he was allowed to purchase a nomination form worth fifty million naira, cleared for screening, and made to believe he was a genuine contestant, only to later discover that some party leaders had already agreed among themselves that Yayi would be the sole candidate. If that account holds up, then the primary was not a contest at all. It was theatre, with Hunye cast as an extra paying real money for a role that was never meant to be genuine.

This is where the case for Hunye becomes difficult to brush aside. A political party cannot collect fifty million naira from a man, put him through the motions of screening, and then turn around and treat his continued interest in the race as an act of rebellion. If leaders truly excluded him from strategy meetings simply because he refused to step down, that is not party discipline. That is the silencing of a legitimate voice for the comfort of the powerful. Hunye’s decision to go to court, rather than to the streets, also strengthens his position in the eyes of ordinary Nigerians who are tired of politicians who threaten violence when they do not get their way. He has said, repeatedly, that his fight is about due process, not about parading himself as an alternative candidate, and that distinction matters.

Yayi’s camp, for its part, will argue that primaries are messy by nature, that not every aspirant who buys a form is guaranteed a fair shake, and that the party’s internal machinery, however imperfect, ultimately produced a winner recognised by the leadership and submitted to INEC. There is some weight to this. Parties are not courts of law, and consensus-building, however uncomfortable for those left out, is a recognised part of Nigerian political culture. Yayi did not design the process; he simply benefited from it.

Here, however, the national leadership of the APC itself becomes an inconvenient witness against the Ogun chapter’s handling of the matter. The party’s own stated position on consensus arrangements is unambiguous: a consensus candidate can only be validly adopted where every single cleared aspirant gives voluntary, written consent. Not a majority. Not the loudest voices in the room. Every one of them, in writing, freely given. This position, anchored on the framework in Section 87 of the Electoral Act, exists precisely to prevent the kind of quiet, backroom arrangement that Hunye alleges was imposed on him. Where even one aspirant withholds that consent, the party’s own rules do not permit leaders to paper over the disagreement and move on as though unanimity existed. The rulebook says the field must instead open up for a direct primary, contested freely by all qualified aspirants.

This is precisely why the silence being demanded of Hunye by certain party leaders in Ogun sits so awkwardly with the party’s own doctrine. The APC does not, on its own terms, support a graveyard hush imposed on a dissenting aspirant simply because it is administratively convenient.

A party that preaches unanimous, written consent at the national level cannot, in the same breath, expect one of its own governorship hopefuls in Ogun to swallow his objections and disappear quietly, particularly when he insists he never signed off on any such consensus. If Hunye is telling the truth that no such written consent was ever given, then Ogun APC leaders were not exercising legitimate consensus-building; they were substituting their own preference for a process the party’s constitution does not actually permit them to shortcut.

That gap between what the national party says consensus requires and what appears to have happened on the ground in Ogun is exactly the kind of technicality that Nigerian election tribunals have shown themselves willing to seize upon. If the courts eventually agree with Hunye that the process was engineered before the primary was even conducted, and that no valid written consent underpinned Yayi’s emergence, then Yayi’s victory becomes a poisoned chalice. A candidate whose emergence is later voided by a tribunal or a court does not just lose a ticket; he loses months of campaign momentum, donor confidence, and public goodwill, often at the worst possible time, close to the general election. Nigeria’s political history is littered with candidates who celebrated too early, only to watch their mandates unravel in court because the party that produced them cut corners to avoid a real contest.

This is why the removal of Hunye’s banners in Ijebu-Ode and Abeokuta, ordinary as it might look to outsiders, is not a small matter. When a state government’s own signage agency is used to erase messages simply reminding the public that a legal dispute is ongoing, it sends a signal that the ruling structure fears an informed electorate more than it fears the courtroom. That fear is itself a confession. A party truly confident in the fairness of its primary, and truly confident it followed its own consensus rules to the letter, would have nothing to hide, and nothing to sweep off the walls of Ogun State.

•Points raised in this article mainly belong to the author.