The defection of a member of the National Assembly, Senator Saliu Mustapha, from the All Progressives Congress to the People’s Democratic Party, has deepened the ruling party’s crisis in Kwara state ahead of 2027 elections, exposing deep governorship succession wounds. Sunday Aborisade reports.
The simmering crisis within the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Kwara State boiled over last weekend, as Senator Saliu Mustapha, representing Kwara Central Senatorial District, formally resigned from the ruling party and defected to the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), dealing the APC its most damaging blow yet ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Mustapha’s exit, announced after weeks of speculation, was quickly followed by that of another prominent APC figure, Hon. Kolo Jiya of Patigi Local Government Area, who has also defected to the PDP and is reportedly eyeing the party’s senatorial ticket for Kwara North.
Their departure signals that months of internal reconciliation efforts by the APC have failed to heal the wounds inflicted by a bitterly contested governorship primary.
The defections did not emerge in a vacuum. They followed sustained protests by no fewer than 10 APC governorship aspirants who had accused the party leadership of railroading the process to impose the Speaker of the Kwara State House of Assembly, Hon. Salihu Yahaya Danladi, as Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq’s anointed successor.
That grievance, aggrieved members say, was never adequately addressed by the party’s reconciliation committee, leaving the field open for an exodus.
Mustapha, who chairs the Senate Committee on Agriculture and Rural Development, has been at pains to frame his departure not as a personal rebellion but as the coordinated action of a broader political bloc.
Speaking on a nationally televised interview monitored by THISDAY, the senator disclosed that his move was backed by an alliance he described as the “Rainbow Coalition,” bringing together the G15 group of aggrieved governorship aspirants, the Otoge Progressives (TOP), and the party’s elders’ caucus in the state.
Among those he listed as members or associates of the coalition were Senator Yahaya Oloriegbe, Dele Belgore (SAN), Senator Lola Ashiru, and Senator Sadiq Umar, alongside other APC heavyweights whose disillusionment with the state chapter’s leadership style has evidently reached a boiling point.
“I did not abandon the APC. But I have left the APC with a collective understanding. I’m representing the group in PDP so as to reset what AbdulRazaq thinks he wants to do,” Mustapha said, framing his exit as an act of political recalibration rather than betrayal.
He was equally emphatic that the coalition’s quarrel was with the governor’s management style, not with President Bola Tinubu, whose 2027 re-election ambition, he insisted, remains firmly backed by the group even from within PDP ranks.
In a twist that underscores the unusual texture of Nigeria’s coalition politics, Mustapha maintained that the PDP was chosen deliberately as the platform most sympathetic to Tinubu’s national ambitions, even as the coalition works to dislodge the APC’s structure in Kwara.
“President Tinubu will even garner more votes this time around for himself. But at the state level, Tinubu will win at the national, while at the state, APC is a goner,” he declared, painting a picture of a split-ticket strategy in which loyalty to the president and hostility to the state chapter can coexist.
He dismissed as false reports that the Presidency had endorsed Speaker Danladi-Salihu as the party’s preferred governorship candidate.
“The Villa did not endorse Danladi as the candidate for us. Nothing like that. I’m 100 per cent sure because I’m an active participant in this process,” he said, seeking to detach Aso Rock from what he portrayed as a Kwara-specific leadership failure.
At the heart of Mustapha’s complaint is an allegation of manipulated primaries and shifting goalposts. He claimed AbdulRazaq initially threw his weight behind a different aspirant before Danladi-Salihu emerged less than 48 hours later, and that the governor had quietly encouraged multiple Kwara Central aspirants to contest solely to frustrate his ambition.
He also took exception to the governor’s late resort to zoning arguments, insisting that Kwara’s politics had historically rewarded competence over rotation.
“With all due respect, like I said, Kwara has not been driven by rotation. It’s about competence,” he said, rejecting the zoning logic that many believe was deployed to justify Danladi-Salihu’s emergence.
Mustapha further alleged that the speed with which voting, collation and results were announced after Friday prayers at the primary raised serious credibility concerns, and he distanced himself from a purported document suggesting he had agreed to serve only one Senate term in exchange for staying out of the governorship race, describing the document as containing a misspelling of his name and misrepresenting the actual understanding he had signed onto.
For Mustapha, a former Deputy National Chairman of the defunct Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and one of the political actors involved in the merger talks that birthed the APC, the decision to walk away from the party he helped build was, by his own admission, far from easy.
“This is not an easy decision for me because it’s a collective decision that we must stop this shenanigans,” he said, adding that his ambition had always been to govern Kwara State rather than merely warm a Senate seat.
He expressed unwavering confidence that the coalition would prevail against AbdulRazaq in the 2027 governorship race while he retains his senatorial seat under the PDP banner. “I will have won the election 12 o’clock before 1 o’clock,” he boasted.
Beyond the politics of the defection, Mustapha used the platform to defend his legislative record, citing the facilitation of tractors, agricultural tricycles, electrification projects, transformers, medical facilities, school renovations and feeder roads across Kwara Central during his time in the Senate. As chairman of the Agriculture Committee, he said his focus had been on boosting agricultural productivity as a poverty-reduction strategy in line with the Tinubu administration’s economic agenda.
He pushed back against suggestions that poverty levels in his district reflected poorly on his performance, arguing that his constitutional mandate was limited to legislation and oversight, while responsibility for infrastructure and economic opportunity rested squarely with the executive arm.
Mustapha also addressed his growing alliance with former Senate President, Dr Bukola Saraki, the PDP’s leading figure in Kwara, clarifying that the partnership did not amount to an abandonment of Tinubu since Saraki himself is not a 2027 contestant.
He described the emerging alignment as one in which PDP structures in Kwara would work to secure Tinubu’s re-election nationally while simultaneously working to unseat the APC locally, an arrangement he conceded was unusual but, in his view, necessary.
“We want to reset the political mood in Kwara, so that not AbdulRahman or not Saliu Mustapha, anybody that comes there or that finds themselves there again, will not take everybody for granted,” he said, framing the defection as a broader statement about accountability in Kwara’s political culture rather than a personal vendetta.
THISDAY gathered that Mustapha has already secured the PDP’s ticket to contest the Kwara Central senatorial seat in 2027, setting up a direct confrontation with the APC candidate for the seat, who is expected to be Governor AbdulRazaq himself once his current term expires.
The twin defections of Mustapha and Jiya represent the most serious setback yet for the APC in Kwara, a state the party has controlled since the “Otoge” revolution swept away the old Saraki political dynasty. With the reconciliation committee’s efforts seemingly overtaken by events, the APC now faces the unenviable task of containing further defections while managing a governorship succession battle that has already fractured its ranks along multiple fault lines.
For the PDP, meanwhile, the influx of disaffected APC heavyweights offers a rare opportunity to reassert itself across Kwara’s three senatorial districts, a prospect that, if the “Rainbow Coalition” holds together, could make the 2027 contest in the state one of the most closely watched in the North-Central region.