By Usman Adewale | Political Analyst, Ikorodu, Lagos
They heard us. They may not say so. They will not admit it. But the speed and the tone of Sunday’s press statement from Lagos APC chairman Pastor Cornelius Ojelabi, arriving barely days after this column and the widespread murmurs it has amplified, tells its own story. When a party machinery that has spent two decades operating in comfortable silence suddenly issues a “stern warning” about unauthorised endorsements and premature consensus arrangements, something has shifted. And that something is public pressure.
So let the record show: the people spoke. The silent grumblings of APC members across the local governments, the whispered conversations in Ikorodu motor parks and Surulere beer parlours and Mushin market stalls, the growing anger of party faithful who have watched their votes treated as irrelevant for too long, that pressure, building steadily, has produced the first visible crack in the wall of GAC impunity.
Ojelabi’s statement is, whether its authors intend it to be or not, an acknowledgement that something has gone wrong. That aspirants are being railroaded. That the process, even before it formally begins, has been contaminated.
That acknowledgement is welcome. It is overdue. But it is nowhere near enough.
A STATEMENT IS NOT A GUARANTEE
Let us be precise about what Sunday’s press statement actually does and does not do.
It warns local government chairmen against publicly “raising the hands” of aspirants and presenting them as consensus candidates. It says the party has issued no guidelines or directives for primaries. It promises a “level playing field” and commits to “transparent internal democratic processes.” Pastor Ojelabi even invokes justice, equity, and fairness as foundational values of the Lagos APC.
These are fine words. The APC in Lagos has always had fine words. What it has rarely had is the institutional courage to ensure that those words govern actual conduct when powerful interests push in a different direction.
Because here is the reality this statement carefully avoids confronting: the problem in Lagos 2027 is not the local government chairmen raising aspirants’ hands at rallies. That is a symptom. The disease is the GAC itself, the extra-constitutional body sitting above the party’s legitimate organs, operating without a single line of democratic mandate, and conducting its own parallel candidate selection process in living rooms and hotel suites while the party’s elected executives issue press statements about fairness.
If Pastor Ojelabi is serious about a level playing field, the statement must be followed by action directed not just at ward-level officials conducting roadside endorsements, but at the council of elders whose nods and winks set the entire machinery of imposition in motion from the top. Punishing the foot soldiers while leaving the generals untouched is not reform. It is performance.
THE CONSENSUS FRAUD MUST END; HERE AND NOW
Let this column state its position plainly, for the benefit of any GAC member reading these words: the politics of so-called consensus candidacy in Lagos APC is not democracy. It has never been democracy. It is the privatisation of public political choice, the conversion of what should be a legitimate, participatory, member-driven process into a transaction conducted among a small number of men who were elected by nobody and answer to nobody.
The APC National Chairman has reportedly confirmed that President Tinubu himself has directed that party members across the country be allowed to choose their preferred candidates through direct primaries, and that in Lagos specifically, members must be allowed to queue behind candidates of their choice should consensus fail. This is the president’s own directive. It is the right directive. And it should be implemented without equivocation, without the engineering of a “consensus” that pre-empts the primary before a single delegate votes. But is Ogun state not among them or has the President forgotten so quickly how Ogun state’s version of GAC imposed an aspirant above all others?
Because the alternative, another round of Lagos-style consensus where the outcome is decided in a room before the process begins, with the primary serving merely as a rubber stamp, is not just undemocratic. In 2027, given the current temperature of public feeling in Lagos, it could be catastrophic.
REMEMBER WHAT THEY DID TO AMBODE
The GAC and the Lagos APC machine have a specific, documented record on primaries. And it is not a record that inspires confidence.
In 2019, when Akinwunmi Ambode, a sitting governor with a verifiable performance record, attempted to seek re-election through the APC primary, what Lagosians witnessed was not a democratic exercise. It was a coordinated act of political violence dressed in electoral clothing. Thugs were deployed to polling centres across Lagos armed with pankere, the long canes used to flog recalcitrant schoolchildren. APC delegates who had come to vote for Ambode were whipped, intimidated, and chased away from voting points. Those who remained voted under duress, surrounded by enforcers whose message was unambiguous: vote the way you are told, or face the consequences.
That was not a primary. It was a public execution of internal democracy, carried out in daylight, and the party said nothing. The GAC said nothing. Nobody was sanctioned. Nobody was disciplined. The result was ratified, the victim was discarded, and Lagos moved on, as though the systematic disenfranchisement of party members at their own primary was simply the cost of doing political business.
The Ojelabi statement talks about ensuring processes are “free from intimidation, coercion, or any form of undue influence.” Those are precisely the conditions that were shredded in 2019. If the party is now suddenly committed to those principles, let it begin by acknowledging what happened to Ambode as a wrong that must never be repeated. Let it name what occurred as what it was, rigging, violence, and the weaponisation of state power against a party member exercising his constitutional right. Let it establish, credibly and publicly, what consequences exist for any repetition.
Otherwise, Sunday’s statement is not a commitment to fairness. It is a public relations exercise ahead of a process that has already been decided.
THE DYNASTY PROBLEM IN PLAIN SIGHT
There is a dimension to the Hamzat candidacy that the party’s press statement does not address, because to address it honestly would require the GAC to indict itself. And that is the question of whose interests the GAC is actually serving when it gravitates towards Hamzat as its preferred candidate.
Insiders within the APC, including those who have spent years inside the Lagos political machine and have no particular axe to grind, say the same thing in private, even when they will not say it in public: the GAC’s enthusiasm for Hamzat is not rooted primarily in his qualifications or his vision for Lagos. It is rooted in the fact that his late father was a GAC member. The logic of the arrangement, stripped of its political dressing, is this: GAC members take care of their own. They have installed their children in local government chairmanships, in the House of Assembly, in party offices across the state. Hamzat, son of a GAC elder, is simply next in the inheritance queue.
The chairman of the GAC body reportedly has his son as Council Chairman in Lagos Island, while another member is said to be pushing for his son to be Council Chairman in Ajeromi-Ifelodun, despite already having one at the Lagos House of Assembly. This is the pattern. Father in the GAC, children in public office, Lagos governance as a family business, distributed among the founding shareholders.
When the governorship of Nigeria’s most economically significant state, a position that commands the administration of a GDP that rivals entire African countries, is reduced to a hereditary reward for GAC membership, Lagos is no longer a democracy. It is a private estate, and its 24 million residents are tenants voting in elections whose outcomes are already determined by the landlords.
The party chairman’s statement does not speak to this. It speaks about local government officials acting prematurely. But the entire premise of the Hamzat coronation project is a GAC arrangement, not a ward-level chairman raising hands at a rally. If Ojelabi is serious, the statement must eventually address the principal actors, not just their foot soldiers.
ALL ASPIRANTS ARE PARTY MEMBERS. ALL HAVE RIGHTS.
Here is the fundamental democratic principle that the GAC system consistently tramples: every aspirant who has met the constitutional requirements to contest for the governorship of Lagos State, whether that is Akinwunmi Ambode, Obafemi Hamzat, any of the other names being mentioned, is a registered, dues-paying, card-carrying member of the All Progressives Congress. They each have equal rights under the party constitution. They each have an equal right to present themselves to delegates at a properly conducted primary and make their case.
The moment the GAC, or any organ of the party, pre-selects one of them as the consensus candidate before the primary has been conducted, regardless of how that consensus is described, whether as the product of “consultations,” “stakeholder meetings,” or “the will of the party elders”, it has violated the rights of every other aspirant. It has violated the rights of every delegate who would have voted differently had the process been free. And it has violated the democratic contract that legitimises the APC’s claim to represent Lagos.
Aspirants are not supplicants seeking the GAC’s favour. They are members of a political party exercising constitutional rights that no advisory council, regardless of its age or its claimed authority, has the power to extinguish.
WHAT REAL ACTION LOOKS LIKE
This column welcomes the chairman’s statement. But it will not be satisfied by statements. Here is what genuine commitment to a fair primary in Lagos 2027 requires, in concrete terms:
The party must publish clear, detailed primary guidelines, including the mode of primary, the delegate composition, the timetable, and the appeals process, before any further political activity takes place. These guidelines must be binding on every organ of the party, including the GAC.
The GAC must issue its own public commitment to non-interference in the primary process. Not a private understanding. A public commitment, on the record, that the council will not convene to select or endorse a candidate before the primary, and that any member of the council who does so will face the same disciplinary consequences threatened against local government chairmen.
Security must be guaranteed at primary venues. The scenes of 2019, the pankere-wielding thugs, the intimidation of Ambode supporters at polling points, must not be allowed to repeat. The party must engage INEC, law enforcement, and civil society monitors to ensure that delegates can vote their conscience without fear of physical harm.
If consensus candidacy is still being considered, and this column’s position is that since it is provided for, in the new electoral act, then that consensus must emerge from a transparent, documented process of genuine consultation with the full delegate structure, not from a GAC meeting whose conclusions are then presented to the party as a fait accompli.
THE CLOCK IS TICKING
The INEC timetable places the primary window between April 23 and May 30, 2026. That is weeks away. The pressure that produced Sunday’s statement must now intensify, not relax, because the pattern in Lagos APC politics is to issue calming statements while quietly consolidating the predetermined outcome.
The people of Lagos, APC members and non-members alike, Christians and Muslims, indigenes and settlers, the young voter in Alimosho and the market woman in Ojo and the trader in Ikorodu who has watched this state be governed by arrangement for too long, are paying attention. They will know if the primary is clean. They will know if it is not. And they will respond accordingly, at the ballot box, in February 2027, in ways that will not be reversible by any amount of emergency cash or last-minute campaign jingles.
The GAC has a choice. So does Pastor Ojelabi and the Lagos APC leadership. They can act now, genuinely and demonstrably, to deliver a primary that Lagos can be proud of. Or they can manage the process toward a predetermined outcome and discover, once again, that the patience of Lagos voters is not the same thing as their consent.
A statement is a beginning. Democracy requires more than beginnings.
Usman Adewale is a political analyst based in Ikorodu, Lagos.
