UBA SANI AND THE EKITI ASSIGNMENT

 The Kaduna State governor is an asset to APC, writes JOSHUA J. OMOJUWA

Nine out of ten African teams made it to the round of 32 of the ongoing FIFA World Cup. By the time you read this, there is a chance only Morocco would have made it past that round. Egypt have a tie you’d expect them to navigate successfully, but you just never know with our teams. The most painful of the losses has to be Senegal. They were two goals up with five minutes to the end of regulation time; one had to believe they were almost home and dry. Until they weren’t. Bang! Bang! Belgium hit them for two in less than three minutes and 2-0 was suddenly 2-2. Extra time came, a dubious penalty, in my opinion, and yet another African country had played well in the knockout round but was on its way home anyway.

Winning and losing is mental. It is also by design. When you are used to winning, even when in a losing position, you’ve got a depth of muscle memory to draw your belief from. The reverse applies too. Arsenal took years to get past this mental hurdle. The APC is setting up to be that political force of nature that, amidst all the angst against the party in certain quarters, somehow continues to win elections.

When a party appoints a campaign council chairman for an election it cannot lose, the appointment is not about the election. It is about the chairman.

Biodun Oyebanji was always going to win Ekiti. He polled 319,224 votes to the PDP’s 40,543, swept all 16 local governments, and became the first incumbent in the state’s history to secure re-election. An opposition that fractured into more than a dozen splinters, a PDP that spent the campaign season in court over its own primary, and a governor with genuine cross-party goodwill, this was not a contest that required rescuing. Which makes the question worth asking: what, exactly, was Uba Sani’s job?

Start with what is on the record. In a letter dated April 24 and signed by the APC’s national secretary, Ajibola Basiru, the party named the Kaduna State governor Chairman of its National Campaign Council for Ekiti. Look at what was assembled beneath him and you begin to understand the scale of the statement the APC was making. Senate President Godswill Akpabio as vice-chairman. Speaker Tajudeen Abbas. Governors Uzodimma, Zulum, AbdulRazaq, Abiodun, Bago, Aliyu, Aiyedatiwa. Femi Gbajabiamila. Kayode Fayemi. Yahaya Bello. Ministers Dele Alake and Bunmi Tunji-Ojo. For a state governorship election with a foregone conclusion, the ruling party fielded something close to a parallel Federal Executive Council. You do not deploy an aircraft carrier to catch a fish. You deploy it to be seen.

Sani himself understood the assignment, and said so with unusual candour. Touring polling units in Ado-Ekiti on election day, he described the poll as a referendum on President Tinubu’s performance and the APC’s popularity. He then led journalists into the party’s situation room, where officials were running what he described as artificial intelligence-enabled systems to track voting outcomes and verify field reports against INEC’s own returns in real time. The ruling party of Nigeria now runs an AI-assisted election monitoring operation, ward by ward, in a state of roughly a million registered voters. Whatever else one says about the APC, nobody should accuse it of treating elections casually. The party claimed structures in all 16 local governments and all 177 wards before a single rally was held. The opposition, meanwhile, was still litigating who its candidate was.

As results trickled in, Shehu Sani, former senator, activist, and now an APC senatorial candidate in Kaduna, posted that Governor Uba Sani would “help in positively facilitating the victory of the ruling party.” Facilitating. Nigerians, fluent in the grammar of our elections, seized on the word immediately: facilitate how? With what? The governor of Kaduna has no vote in Ikere and no cousin in Efon. The suspicion embedded in those replies is the inheritance of every Nigerian election, earned over decades. But here is the uncomfortable truth for the suspicious: Yiaga Africa’s parallel vote tabulation confirmed that the declared results matched what was counted at the polling units. Whatever facilitation occurred, the count itself held.

So back to the real question. If Ekiti did not need Uba Sani to win, why Uba Sani?

The right question is, why not Uba Sani? The governor has helped to reunite the party in Kaduna whilst bringing several opposition members into the fold. Southern Kaduna, once a place where the APC only knew how to lose elections, is now fast becoming an APC stronghold. In three years of his administration, development has stretched beyond the capital to the nooks and crannies of the state. In Uba Sani, the APC was showing off one of its better examples of governance that works, that delivers and unites the people.

Sani was already a Renewed Hope Ambassador and deputy director-general for party outreach, engagement and mobilisation. Ekiti adds a line to the résumé: the northern governor who delivered a South-West landslide, who can be dropped into unfamiliar territory and coordinate a council of egos, a Senate president, a Speaker, seven governors, without friction making the news. In a party where influence is measured by proximity to the President and utility to the machine, Sani has quietly accumulated both. The commentary class has begun calling him the APC’s emerging chief strategist. The title does not flatter him; the trajectory does not lie.

The lesson of Ekiti, then, is not that Uba Sani won it. Oyebanji’s incumbency and the opposition’s self-immolation won it. Uba Sani only came to take it home. The lesson is that the APC has professionalised the business of winning; situation rooms, AI dashboards, ward-level structures, interlocking councils of federal power, while its opponents are still professionalising the business of losing. The other lesson is that in Uba Sani, the APC knows it’s got an exemplary asset. Come 2027, the contest will not be between candidates. It will be between a machine and whatever the rest manage to assemble in the time remaining.

 Omojuwa is chief strategist, Alpha Reach/BGX Publishing