Sunday edition, September 7, 2026
Nigeria’s political landscape moved on multiple fronts this past week, a Kano assassination that touched the ruling party’s grassroots structure, a former governor’s dramatic resignation from the APC while wanted over an alleged coup plot, a court ruling casting fresh doubt over the ADC’s internal legitimacy, an opposition leader’s death, a widening lobbying and FOIA battle in Washington over President Tinubu’s American legal history, and a six-party coalition taking its first concrete steps toward a unified 2027 challenger. This edition surveys the week across all seven parties currently shaping the national conversation, followed by a synthesis of what it means for the country as a whole.
APC (All Progressives Congress)
The ruling party’s week was defined less by strategy than by security shocks and an unusually public internal wound. In Kano State, suspected bandits assassinated Alhaji Garba Buba, the APC’s Rantan Ward chairman in Bebeji local government area, in an overnight raid that also saw his wife and two children abducted, an attack this newspaper covered in detail and one that directly touched the party’s own grassroots structure just months before the 2027 campaign period intensifies. Separately, in Borno State, the convoy of Mustapha Gubio, the APC’s consensus governorship candidate, survived a Boko Haram ambush involving a landmine and rocket-propelled grenades along the Gubio-Kareto-Damasak highway; a multi-agency security escort repelled the attack with no casualties recorded.
The party’s most consequential internal story, however, was the resignation of former Bayelsa Governor and ex-Minister of State for Petroleum Resources Timipre Sylva, a founding APC member who quit the party this week while remaining wanted by the EFCC over an alleged $14.86 million fraud case and named among six defendants in a 13-count federal treason and terrorism charge tied to an alleged coup plot against President Tinubu. Sylva accused the EFCC of functioning as “an organ of the APC” and urged Nigerians to vote the ruling party out in 2027; the EFCC responded within hours by summoning him for questioning. Separately, Kano State saw a wave of defections into the APC this week, with former NNPP figures including Rt. Hon. Isyaku Ali Danja, Hon. Yusuf Bello Danbatta, and Senator Baraka Sani joining the ruling party, a reminder that even amid its security and internal-credibility troubles, the APC continues to attract defectors from rival and smaller parties at the state level. Defence Minister Christopher Musa also generated controversy this week by predicting an APC sweep of Kaduna State in 2027 while simultaneously accusing former Governor Nasir El-Rufai of deliberately fuelling Southern Kaduna killings during his tenure, remarks critics say were inappropriate for a sitting security minister to make.
PDP (Peoples Democratic Party)
The PDP’s week was dominated by the continuing fallout from its unresolved internal leadership crisis between the Kabiru Tanimu Turaki-led National Working Committee and the rival, Wike-backed National Caretaker Committee. The Turaki-led faction formally endorsed the G-100 opposition coalition process this week, attending the group’s inaugural August 31 meeting through Board of Trustees Secretary Dr. Babangida Aliyu, a move this newspaper reported carries real ambiguity given that Nigeria currently has no single, judicially settled national PDP leadership to make such a commitment binding on the whole party.
The party also mourned a significant loss this week: Chief Daniel Osi Orbih, the PDP’s National Vice Chairman for the South-South zone and a longtime Edo State party strategist and close Wike ally, died on August 31. Wike led public tributes, describing Orbih as “one of the biggest trees in the political forest of Edo State.” Orbih’s death, coming amid the party’s ongoing factional dispute, represents a genuine loss of institutional memory and South-South organisational capacity for a party already struggling to present a unified face ahead of 2027.
ADC (African Democratic Congress)
The ADC’s week centred on a serious institutional threat to its own legitimacy. This newspaper reported in detail on the Court of Appeal’s ruling affirming a Federal High Court order barring INEC from recognising congresses and a national convention organised under the Senator David Mark-led caretaker leadership, with the appellate court declaring those proceedings a nullity for having been conducted in defiance of a subsisting court order. The ADC has said it will appeal to the Supreme Court, but the ruling casts a genuine shadow over the legal standing of candidates selected through that convention process, including former Vice President Atiku Abubakar’s own presidential candidacy under the ADC banner.
Compounding matters, Atiku’s Washington-based lobbying firm, Von Batten-Montague-York, escalated its involvement in the separate, unrelated US FOIA litigation over President Tinubu’s FBI and DEA records this week, filing a formal amicus curiae motion with the US District Court for the District of Columbia and, in a still more serious development, publicly alleging that a figure “connected to” Tinubu had offered the firm’s managing partner a $3 million bribe and a secret London meeting to abandon its campaign, an allegation the Nigerian government had not directly rebutted as of nearly 18 hours after it was made public. The Presidency did, separately, issue a detailed statement this week insisting the underlying FOIA case is a civil, not criminal, matter, disclosing that the FBI and DEA have produced 399 pages of records under seal, with firm September 11 and September 18 deadlines now governing the case’s next phase.
NDC (Nigeria Democratic Congress)
The NDC’s week combined a genuine institutional headache with high-profile campaign activity from its presidential candidate. This newspaper reported on the party’s formal dispute with INEC over the alleged replacement of NDC candidates for several Anambra and Benue State House of Assembly seats, with National Chairman Senator Moses Cleopas Zuwoghe accusing the commission of “criminally handpicking candidates,” a charge INEC’s Mohammed Haruna flatly rejected, saying the commission lacks legal authority to select or substitute any party’s candidates and published only what its own officials witnessed signed at the party’s primaries. The dispute is headed to court and carries particular weight given Anambra is presidential candidate Peter Obi’s home state.
Obi himself had an active week on the campaign trail, delivering a pointed historical critique of Nigeria’s institutional decline (Nigerian Airways versus Emirates, the vanished National Shipping Line) at the Daily Times of Nigeria’s 100th anniversary in Abuja, before travelling to a Port Harcourt town hall where he warned that “our votes this time must count” and issued a striking open challenge inviting any Nigerian to raise anything they have against him personally. Obi also sharpened his criticism of Tinubu’s US records case this week, calling the president’s resistance to disclosure “profoundly embarrassing” for Nigeria, a remark that drew a direct counter-challenge from Reno Omokri, who urged Obi to release his own FBI records first, arguing “every presidential candidate likely to contest 2027” holds some form of FBI record.
SDP (Social Democratic Party)
The SDP’s week was comparatively quieter on breaking developments but continued to build out its 2027 messaging machinery, with this newspaper preparing detailed interview groundwork for vice-presidential candidate Dr. Usman Bugaje, running alongside presidential candidate Prince Adewole Adebayo, spanning insecurity, subsidy policy, state police, restructuring, and the ongoing FOIA and Electoral Act controversies. The party remains one of the six signatories to the G-100 opposition coalition process alongside the ADC, NDC, PDP, PRP and APM, and its participation in that process, alongside the SDP’s own distinct positioning on constitutional restructuring and state policing, will likely be tested as the coalition’s working groups continue drafting shared frameworks in the coming weeks.
PRP (Peoples Redemption Party)
The PRP featured prominently this week through its national leadership’s participation in the G-100 coalition’s inaugural summit, with National Chairman Dr. Hakeem Baba-Ahmed describing the gathering as historic and urging fellow candidates to recognise the weight of national expectation on the process. PRP figures were also vocal critics of the government this week on a separate front: Baba-Ahmed publicly questioned the simultaneous foreign absence of both President Tinubu, on his ongoing European vacation, and Vice President Kashim Shettima, following the AU summit in Angola, asking pointedly who was actually in charge of governance in their absence, a question that gained renewed relevance amid the government’s continued silence on the Von Batten bribery allegation this week.
AAC (African Action Congress)
The AAC’s week was defined by an escalating dispute over the treatment of its leader and 2027 presidential candidate, Omoyele Sowore. The party formally condemned what it described as covert surveillance of Sowore, after his team discovered an electronic GPS tracking device, identified as a Spytec GL300, attached to a security vehicle used during his recent visit to Port Harcourt for the Nigerian Bar Association’s annual general conference. The AAC has alleged possible Department of State Services involvement and linked the incident to what it calls a longstanding pattern of arrest, detention and prosecution targeting Sowore, including his ongoing prosecution over social media comments referring to President Tinubu as a “criminal.” Separately this week, Sowore was among the most vocal public critics of the Lagos pension protest crackdown this newspaper reported on, condemning the use of tear gas against elderly pensioners as “cruel, reckless, and completely unacceptable” and calling for the officers responsible to be identified and prosecuted.
The national picture: what the week adds up to
Taken together, this week’s developments across all seven parties point to three converging national dynamics ahead of 2027. First, opposition coalition-building is genuinely, if fragilely, advancing: the G-100 process now has formal or de facto participation from the ADC, NDC, PDP (Turaki faction), SDP and PRP, a broader coalition than April’s failed Ibadan attempt, though the ADC’s own legal legitimacy crisis and the PDP’s unresolved factional dispute mean the coalition’s foundational members are themselves standing on genuinely uncertain institutional ground. Second, security has intruded directly into party politics in a way that transcends any single party’s messaging, an APC ward chairman assassinated, an APC governorship candidate’s convoy ambushed, and opposition figures across multiple parties citing insecurity as evidence of governmental failure, suggesting that whatever else divides Nigeria’s parties, the country’s security crisis is becoming an inescapable, cross-partisan backdrop to every other political story. Third, the Tinubu administration’s American legal history has become genuinely inseparable from mainstream 2027 campaign discourse, no longer confined to Atiku’s camp or Washington lobbying circles, but now actively debated by Peter Obi, rebutted in detail by the Presidency, and entangled with a serious, unresolved bribery allegation the government had, as of this week, still not directly addressed.
The Atlantic Digest will continue its weekly political round-up format and will track each of these seven parties’ activities as the 2027 campaign season intensifies.
