By Mohammed Bello Doka
There is a comforting myth in Nigerian politics that power is safest when it is largest—when a ruling party keeps expanding, absorbing rivals, welcoming defectors, and piling numbers upon numbers until opposition looks irrelevant. The All Progressives Congress (APC) appears to believe this myth. By every visible metric, the party is expanding far beyond what is strictly necessary to govern. Governors cross over, lawmakers follow, structures realign, and the map grows increasingly uniform.
Yet political power does not only obey ambition; it obeys logic. And one of the coldest laws of political logic is this: victory, when mismanaged, eventually turns inward.
To understand why APC’s expansion may become its most serious future problem, one must step away from personalities and propaganda and examine the structure of power itself—specifically, the logic described by the Minimum Winning Coalition theory. This theory holds that rational political actors need only as much support as is required to win and govern; anything beyond that creates surplus actors whose expectations cannot be permanently satisfied. APC today is not shrinking toward a minimum coalition. It is doing the opposite. And therein lies the danger.
The APC no longer expands because it must. It expands because it can. Electoral victory has already been secured; legislative control is established; institutional dominance is visible. Defections are no longer about survival but about insurance—an attempt to crowd out the future, to deny rivals oxygen before they even assemble. In the short term, this feels like strength. In the long term, it is strategic overreach.
Power is finite. Offices are limited. Influence cannot be endlessly subdivided. Yet every new entrant into an already victorious coalition arrives with expectations—appointments, tickets, protection, relevance. What was once loyalty becomes entitlement. What was once gratitude becomes grievance. The surplus does not dissolve; it accumulates.
Nowhere is this contradiction clearer than at the state level, where Nigerian politics is actually decided. As APC grows in states it already controls, multiple power centres begin to coexist uneasily within the same structure. Defectors displace early builders. Governors inherit overcrowded alliances. Party executives sit atop fragile compromises. State assemblies become arenas of silent rivalry rather than instruments of governance. These are not accidents; they are predictable outcomes of overexpansion.
The instinctive response of dominant parties is always the same: discipline, centralisation, enforcement. But discipline cannot substitute for incentives, and central control cannot erase ambition. Suppressed competition does not disappear—it mutates. It goes underground, waits for primaries, waits for succession battles, waits for moments of vulnerability. A party can silence dissent, but it cannot abolish rivalry when too many powerful actors are locked inside the same room with too few exits.
History offers a quiet warning here. Dominant parties rarely collapse because opposition defeats them head-on. They weaken because internal competition becomes more dangerous than external challenge. When victory removes enemies, expansion creates rivals. The struggle shifts from “us versus them” to “which of us next?”
APC’s current trajectory suggests that its greatest future test will not come from outside the party. It will come from managing the contradictions of its own success. As election cycles approach, surplus actors will seek distinction. Loyalty will fracture along ambition lines. Internal contests will harden. What today looks like unity will tomorrow reveal itself as unresolved competition.
This is the paradox of power unchecked by restraint. Winning broadens a coalition; governing requires limits. When a party refuses to recognize the difference, victory stops pointing outward and begins to turn inward.
APC is strong today. But strength that grows without structure eventually consumes itself. Power obeys arithmetic, not sentiment—and arithmetic is unforgiving.
Mohammed Bello Doka is the publisher Abuja Network News can be reached @[email protected]
Also on twitter @Doka3010
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