APC is overloaded and will soon explode. Here is why.

By Mohammed Bello Doka

16 April, 2026.

Listen carefully to what is coming out of Abuja. Not the official statements. Not the carefully staged photographs of party leaders holding hands. Listen to the whispers in the National Assembly corridors. Watch the governors who refuse to sit in the same room. Pay attention to the leaked memos and the emergency caucus meetings or supposed primary elections called at midnight and canceled at dawn. What you will hear, beneath the noise, is the sound of a political party straining against its own impossible weight. The All Progressives Congress has become a mathematical impossibility. It has swallowed so many defectors, absorbed so many rivals, and welcomed so many opportunists that its own skeleton is cracking. Thirty-one governors out of thirty-six. Eighty-four senators out of one hundred and nine. Two hundred and thirty-one House of Representatives members out of three hundred and sixty. These numbers are not strengths. They are death sentences.

William H. Riker, an American political scientist writing in 1962, solved a puzzle that Nigerian politicians have never bothered to read. In his book The Theory of Political Coalitions, Riker asked a simple question: how large should a winning coalition be? His answer was revolutionary and, for anyone who holds power, deeply uncomfortable. In any zero-sum contest where the prize is fixed and cannot be expanded, rational players will form coalitions that are just large enough to win and no larger. Add one unnecessary member, and you have introduced a hungry mouth that will eventually turn on you. Subtract one essential member, and you lose. The stability of any political alliance depends on keeping it as small as victory permits. Riker called this the Size Principle. He proved it mathematically. He tested it against historical cases from American presidential elections to European parliamentary negotiations. And he was right every single time. Oversized coalitions do not endure. They explode.

What makes Rikers theory so terrifying for the APC is that the party has not merely violated the Size Principle. It has trampled it into the dust. In 2015, the APC was a lean fighting machine. The coalition that brought Muhammadu Buhari to power consisted of a handful of disciplined opposition parties: the ACN from the Southwest, the CPC and ANPP from the Northwest and Northeast, and a splinter of APGA from the Southeast. That was a minimum winning coalition. It was just large enough to defeat Goodluck Jonathans PDP. It held together for two terms because every member understood that the alternative was electoral oblivion. Then victory went to the partys head. The APC decided that more meant stronger. It opened its doors to every PDP governor willing to defect, every senator looking for a presidential pardon, every local government chairman who smelled federal money. The result is a party with no ideological center, no internal discipline, and no capacity to satisfy the demands of its own members.

The mathematics of destruction are already visible to anyone willing to look. Take the governors. There are thirty-one of them. Each one expects something from the federal government in return for his loyalty. A road project. A railway station. A federal university. A waiver from anti-corruption prosecution. A cabinet position for a loyalist. When there were fifteen APC governors, these demands could be managed. When there were twenty, the system began to groan. At thirty-one, the federal budget cannot possibly accommodate everyone. The Debt Management Office confirmed in its latest report that Nigeria spends over ninety percent of its revenue servicing debt. There is simply no money left to bribe thirty-one governors into continued obedience. Some will inevitably conclude that they made a bad bet. They will look for the exit. And when the first governor defects to ADC or to a new third force, the dam will burst.

The National Assembly tells an even more alarming story. The tenth Senate opened with fifty-nine APC senators. That was already a comfortable majority. Then the carpet crossing began. One after another, PDP senators abandoned their party and marched across the aisle. By March 2026, following the defection of Senators Amos Yunana (Adamawa North), Aminu Iya Abbas (Adamawa Central), and Ikra Aliyu Bilbis (Zamfara Central) on March 11, as well as Senator Ipalibo Banigo (Rivers West) the previous day, the APCs Senate membership climbed to eighty-four, while the PDP caucus collapsed from thirty-six senators at inauguration to just fourteen. Senate President Godswill Akpabio himself noted the historic reversal, recalling that during the eighth National Assembly in 2018, approximately thirty senators defected from the APC to the PDP in a single day.

That is not a majority. That is a supermajority that serves no strategic purpose. Every one of those twenty-five additional senators demands a committee chairmanship, a deputy leadership position, or a budgetary favor. But there are only so many committees. Only so many chairmens slots. Only so much money in the appropriation bill. The result is a legislative caucus that spends more time fighting itself than opposing the PDP. Senators who were loyal from the beginning resent the newcomers who leapfrogged them in seniority. Newcomers feel entitled to recognition equal to founding members. The leadership cannot keep peace. The whispers of a revolt are now loud enough to hear with the naked ear.

The evidence is not theoretical. It is happening right now in plain sight. In Bauchi State, the APC caucus has been forced to constitute emergency committees to quell deepening internal rifts caused by the influx of new power-brokers, as reported by Independent Nigeria in April 2026. In Kano, the party is effectively two warring armies under one banner, with supporters of former Governor Abdullahi Ganduje and those of his successor Abba Kabir Yusuf, now paradoxically in the same party after Yusufs defection, clashing openly at party secretariats. In Rivers State, the cold war between Minister Nyesom Wike and his former allies has frozen all party activities for months. The story is the same across board. These are not the signs of a party consolidating power. These are the signs of a party disintegrating from within.

Listen to what the partys own members are saying, not for public consumption but in moments of honesty. Senator Rufai Hanga, now of the ADC but a longtime observer of APC dysfunction, warned in an interview with Guardian Nigeria on February 9, 2026, and I quote directly: The APCs ship will sink because it is overloaded. You will see cracks, confusion, and internal battles once congresses begin. End of quote. Speaking on the same issue, a former APC National Vice Chairman for North-West, Alhaji Salihu Lukman, has repeatedly warned in open letters that the partys expansion without internal democratization is a recipe for collapse. In a letter dated January 20, 2026, addressed to the National Chairman, Lukman argued that the party cannot absorb endless defectors without triggering a catastrophic implosion, warning that the APC risks becoming a casualty of its own greed. Similarly, a former APC lawmaker and veteran political analyst, has consistently argued that the partys oversized structure is unsustainable. In a recent television appearance, he noted that the APC has violated every known principle of coalition management and that the resulting explosion, whether in 2027 or earlier, is not a matter of speculation but of mathematical certainty.

The coming explosion will follow a predictable sequence, one already witnessed in the PDPs 2011 to 2015 death spiral. First, internal factions will harden around identifiable leaders, each commanding a bloc. Second, the primary elections for 2027 will become a savage all-against-all brawl, with no consensus mechanism capable of producing a single candidate. Third, a substantial faction will break away to join an existing opposition platform. Fourth, the remaining rump will limp into the election fatally weakened. The PDP went from twenty-eight governors and a supermajority in 2011 to a shattered opposition in 2015. The APC is on the same trajectory, only accelerated. History does not repeat, but it rhymes. And this rhyme is a death march.

Some will argue that President Tinubus political genius can hold the coalition together. They will point to his decades of alliance-building in Lagos. They will invoke his reputation as a master strategist who has never lost an election. Respectfully, this argument misunderstands the nature of the problem. Tinubu is facing not a political challenge but a mathematical one. No amount of genius can make thirty-one governors share a pie that feeds fifteen. No amount of strategy can convince twenty-five extra senators that they should accept the scraps. Rikers theorem is not a suggestion that a clever leader can circumvent. It is a law of rational behavior, as immutable as gravity. You cannot negotiate with arithmetic.

The only escape would be a dramatic amputation. If the APC could somehow expel its excess members, shrink back to a minimum winning coalition of perhaps eighteen governors and sixty senators, it might stabilize. But that amputation is politically impossible. Those who would be expelled would not leave quietly. They would take their structures, their financiers, and their voters straight to the opposition. The surgery would kill the patient as surely as the disease. There is no way out. The numbers have been set in motion. The coalition is too large. The spoils are too few. The actors are too rational.

Nigerians watching this spectacle should not be deceived by the APCs current dominance. That dominance is a mirage, a statistical artifact of defections that have not yet been tested by an actual election. The moment the 2027 primaries arrive, the illusion will shatter. Governors who control their state machinery will nominate their preferred candidates regardless of party or Presidential directives. Lawmakers who crossed the carpet will discover that their new partys ticket is already promised to other members. Money will flow to the highest bidders, and loyalty will evaporate like morning dew. The APC will not lose because the opposition is strong. It will lose because it destroyed itself from within. Rikers theory does not merely predict the APCs collapse. It guarantees it.

Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]