Two Agendas, One Party: What They Want Versus What Oyo State Needs

By: Olaitan Adedeji

APC party chieftains and the people of Oyo State are not asking the same question, and a purported 2027 candidate list, allegedly linked to the NRS boss, suggests the gap is already widening.
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‎There are two conversations happening inside the APC in Oyo State right now. One is happening in private, in the parlours of party financiers, in the WhatsApp groups of political middlemen, and across the dinner tables of those who believe that their years of investment in the party entitle them to determine its future. The other conversation is happening in the open, in the markets of Ibadan, on the streets of Ogbomoso, in the farms of Oke-Ogun, among ordinary people who simply want a government that works for them.

The tragedy is that these two conversations are not about the same thing. And until the APC forces them to converge, it will keep losing Oyo State. The emergence this week of a purported 2027 APC candidate list, allegedly linked to the boss of the Nigeria Revenue Service, Zacch Adedeji, is precisely the kind of development that widens that gap, and the party’s leadership would be unwise to treat it lightly.
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‎A list That Speaks Before the Process Does
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‎The purported list projects Senator Sharafadeen Alli as the governorship candidate, with Mr. Soji Adedeji as his running mate, and goes further to name candidates across all three senatorial districts and fourteen federal constituencies. It has not been officially confirmed, and party stakeholders have been careful with their words. But its very existence, detailed, structured and already circulating widely, is itself a statement.

Lists like this do not emerge from nowhere. They emerge from somewhere, and that somewhere matters enormously to every APC member in Oyo State, who has not been consulted, whose name does not appear, and whose zone feels either overlooked or taken for granted. Whether the list is authentic or a calculated leak, its effect on internal party cohesion is the same: it signals that decisions may already be made, and that the process is a formality yet to be staged.
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‎What They Want
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What the self-appointed gatekeepers want is not complicated, and it is not entirely without logic. They want a flagbearer they can trust, someone whose emergence they controlled, whose loyalty is therefore guaranteed, and through whom their access to the levers of government will be secured if the party wins. They want a candidate who owes them. They want influence preserved, investments protected and positions assured.

This is, in the unvarnished language of Nigerian politics, the transaction being negotiated, and it is being negotiated as though the people of Oyo State are not watching. The purported list, with its neat alignment of names across every elective position, reads less like a product of internal consultation and more like a portfolio already divided among investors.

The danger is not merely moral. It is strategic. A candidate built to serve the comfort of a few party heavyweights is not built to win a general election. Their campaign messaging will ring hollow. Their ability to mobilise across the state’s diverse zones will be hampered. And the moment other aggrieved party members, those whose preferred candidates do not feature on any such list, sense that the primary is a charade, the quiet sabotage begins.
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‎What is Good for Us, and For he State
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‎What is good for Oyo State, and what is good for the APC as a party with a genuine aspiration to govern, is a flagbearer chosen to win, not to serve a vested interest.

The state needs a candidate whose acceptability cuts across geopolitical zones, whose character invites the confidence of undecided voters, and whose emergence from the primary carries the endorsement, not the resentment, of the party’s major stakeholders. That candidate does not have to be the inner circle’s personal favourite. But the process that produces them must be one that every significant bloc in the party can recognise as fair.

Credibility must be established through process, not proclaimed through a leaked portfolio.
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‎Oyo State deserves a contest. Its voters, long accustomed to being taken for granted, deserve to see a party that is serious. The APC has the potential to offer a compelling alternative to the incumbent. But that potential is being quietly mortgaged every time a backroom arrangement among the party establishment substitutes for an open and credible process.
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‎The Only Path to Reclaiming Oyo
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‎The APC can reclaim Oyo State in 2027. The conditions are not impossible. But the party must first make a clear-eyed choice: to prioritise what the controlling elite want, or to prioritise what the state, and the party’s own future, actually needs. A process that accommodates both ends, that brings the key blocs along, that produces a candidate with genuine cross-zonal appeal and an untainted emergence, is the only guarantee of a serious challenge to the incumbent. A list circulated in the shadows, ‎however well-intentioned its authors may claim it to be, is the opposite of that process.
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‎Party chieftains have a choice. They can be the people who delivered Oyo State to the APC by rising above their personal interests and building a process that the entire party owns, or they can be the reason it was lost again, their names attached forever to a preventable defeat. The purported list is not yet destiny. It is a warning of the direction things are heading. Oyo State is watching. And in 2027, it will give its verdict.