by Mohammed Bello Doka
13 June, 2026.
There is a quiet law that governs all human empires, from the Roman Republic to the military juntas of our recent past. It is the law of diminishing political returns. It states that after a certain point, every additional unit of power, every extra year of incumbency, and every new layer of greed produces less benefit for the system while generating ever more decay.
The Peoples Democratic Party was the first to learn this lesson the hard way. At its peak in 2007, the PDP controlled twenty-eight states, held a supermajority in the National Assembly, and spoke of ruling Nigeria for sixty years. That was the moment of maximum return. And then, almost immediately, the collapse began.
Today, that same party holds no governors and perhaps five senators. It is a ghost at the feast. The APC watched this tragedy unfold in real time. It benefited from it. It conquered the corpse of the PDP. And yet, as every political philosopher from Aristotle to Machiavelli has warned, the conqueror who does not study the corpse of his enemy is destined to become that corpse. The APC refused to learn. And now, it is condemned to share the same fate.
But here is what makes the APC scenario far worse than the PDP’s original sin. Under the PDP, when the spoils of office were shared, they actually went around. The godfathers were greedy, but they understood the mathematics of loyalty. They fed their foot soldiers. They greased the wheels of the machine. The average party loyalist, the ward chairman, the local government agitator, these people ate something.
Today, under the APC, the majority of people holding office or working the trenches are hungry. They are not merely dissatisfied with the leadership. They are starving. The cost of living has crushed them. Inflation has erased whatever value their stipends once had. They look at the vast sums being allegedly diverted from Federation Account allocations, sums reportedly exceeding eight hundred billion naira earmarked for political campaigns, and they ask a simple question: where is my share? The result is a party teeming with desperate men. For most of them, the coming campaign funds will not be seen as resources to win an election. They will be seen as a saving grace. A lifeline. A chance to finally breathe after years of economic suffocation. And so, when the money flows, most of them will pocket it. They will stash it away. They will watch the party structure collapse from within because their personal survival has become more urgent than the party’s victory.
The PDP fell because its leaders were greedy. The APC is falling because its followers are hungry. Hunger makes people unpredictable. Hunger makes people betrayable. And in a political party, when the base stops believing that victory feeds them, the party is already dead.
Consider the evidence now piling up like corpses at a crime scene. The North-Central APC Forum has issued a two-week ultimatum to the party’s National Chairman, Nentawe Yilwatda, demanding his resignation. Their accusation is devastating. They claim that the recent primary elections were monetized from top to bottom. They allege that results were upturned to favour those who danced to the tune of party officials, while aspirants who were clearly winning were screened out arbitrarily. They point to a mathematical impossibility: the party has eight million registered voters, yet the presidential primary result credited President Bola Tinubu with nearly eleven million votes. This is not an election. This is a selection. This is the kind of brazen manipulation that the PDP perfected in its dying days. The APC leadership looks at these numbers and sees victory. Any student of political science looks at these numbers and sees a death warrant.
In Delta State, Senator Ned Nwoko has openly rejected the outcome of the senatorial primary, claiming he won by a landslide margin of approximately one hundred and twenty-three thousand votes to five thousand, only to watch the result handed to his opponent through intimidation, vote-buying, and what he describes as pre-written figures. In state after state, the story is the same. Aspirants who spent fifty million naira for governorship forms, thirty million for senatorial tickets, and twenty million for House of Representatives seats are now demanding refunds. They are crying foul. They are threatening to defect. They are doing exactly what the PDP’s aggrieved members did in 2013. The APC is bleeding from a thousand cuts, and the national leadership seems content to apply a bandage made of propaganda.
Aristotle wrote that the worst form of political decay occurs when leaders seek their own gain rather than the good of the whole. The APC has institutionalized this decay. The party has become a machine designed not to deliver good governance but to extract every possible resource from the state before the music stops. The African Democratic Congress has accused the ruling party of diverting Federation Account funds meant for salaries, healthcare, and education into a political war chest for the 2027 election. Whether the specific figure of eight hundred billion naira is accurate or not, the perception is now fixed in the public mind: the APC leadership is enriching itself while ordinary party members cannot afford to feed their families. This perception is a cancer. And like all cancers, it will metastasize.
Machiavelli observed that men will continue to make the same mistakes over and over because they do not remember the past. The APC has forgotten the PDP’s graveyard. It has forgotten that the five governors who revolted against Jonathan’s leadership in 2013 were not revolutionaries. They were hungry men who felt the spoils were no longer circulating properly. Today, inside the APC, a similar hunger is spreading. The governors are fighting the national chairman. The senators are fighting the governors. The ward chairmen are watching their children go to bed hungry. And every single one of them is calculating the cost of loyalty.
Let there be no ambiguity. The APC will lose the 2027 presidential election. The signs are too numerous, too glaring, too consistent to ignore. A party whose primaries produce eleven million votes from eight million registered voters is not a party. It is a comedy. A party whose National Chairman is being given a two-week ultimatum to resign by his own regional forum is not a party. It is a riot waiting for a spark. A party whose rank and file are so impoverished that they will pocket campaign funds rather than deploy them is not a party. It is a collection of starving men holding a grenade with the pin already pulled. The Nigerian people are watching. They have watched fuel prices rise by nearly five hundred percent. They have watched their savings evaporate. They have watched their children miss school because they cannot afford transport. And they have watched the APC leadership dance at the burial of the PDP without once looking in the mirror. In 2027, the verdict will come. The APC will lose the presidency. That much is certain.
But here is where the prophecy becomes truly terrifying. The APC will not disappear overnight. It will win some governorship races. It will retain a handful of senators and representatives. It will hold onto a few states, perhaps in the North-West and South-West where the machinery of incumbency remains formidable. And those who do not understand political collapse will point to these victories and declare that the party is alive. They will be wrong. Those remaining governors, senators, and representatives will not be the seeds of a comeback. They will be the final gasp of a dying party. They will mark the beginning of the end, not the end of the beginning. Because once the APC loses the presidency, the law of diminishing political returns will accelerate with the fury of a waterfall. The federal patronage that keeps the party’s carcass warm will vanish overnight. The defectors who stayed loyal only because the money flowed will abandon ship faster than rats fleeing a sinking vessel. The governors who won will find themselves isolated, surrounded by hostile state assemblies and a federal government that owes them nothing. The senators who survived will be picked off one by one in the next election cycle. And the party that once ruled Nigeria will descend into a factional bloodbath far uglier than anything the PDP ever experienced.
Why will it be worse for the APC? Because the PDP at least fell with dignity. The PDP fell after sixteen years of uninterrupted rule. It fell with a treasury that had been looted but not emptied. It fell with a structure that, however corrupt, still understood the basic mechanics of political organization. The APC will fall with nothing. It will fall with a treasury that has been drained to fund a doomed campaign. It will fall with a structure that has been cannibalized by hungry men who cared only for their next meal. It will fall with a base that despises it. It will fall with an opposition that, however fragmented today, will smell blood and unite for the kill. The PDP’s collapse was a slow drowning. The APC’s collapse will be a defenestration. A throwing from the window. A sudden, violent, and irreversible fall.
Plato wrote that the decline of any regime follows a predictable pattern, but he also noted that the final stage is always the most brutal. The APC is in that final stage. It does not know it yet. It still talks of thirty-one governors and super majority of legislators. It still boasts of its federal might. It still laughs at the opposition. But the laughter has a desperate quality now. The boasts have a rehearsed quality now. The governors who smile for the cameras are sharpening knives behind closed doors. The senators who praise the president are calculating their escape routes. And the ordinary members, the hungry ones, the starving ones, are already making their peace with defeat. They have already decided that when the campaign funds arrive, they will take their share and disappear. They will not fight for a party that has never fed them. They will not die for a flag that has never flown over their prosperity.
The same fate awaits, but the fate will be crueler. The PDP ruled sixteen years before its collapse became visible. The APC is now in its eleventh year. It will not see a sixteenth. In 2027, the presidential election will be lost. A handful of governors and senators will be won, but these will be the consolations of a corpse. And then the real collapse will begin. The defections will become a flood. The factions will become a civil war. The name APC will become a curse word in the mouths of those who once swore by it. The party will not die with a bang. It will die with a thousand whimpers, each one louder than the last. And when historians write the obituary, they will say this: the APC refused to learn from the mistakes of the PDP. It watched the PDP fall. It saw every error. It understood every warning. And it chose, deliberately and arrogantly, to repeat them all. That refusal is now a death sentence. Not today. Not tomorrow. But in 2027, and then every day after. The law of diminishing political returns is patient. It always collects its debt. And when it comes for the APC, it will take everything.
Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via [email protected]
Abuja Network News
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