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•From Kuje to Borno, death, violence, threats trail APC ahead of 2027 polls
From Fred Itua and Juliana Taiwo-Obalonye, Abuja
From the Sahel hotshot of Borno, to the fringes of Kuje in the Federal Capital Territory, to the heartland of Osun State, and the agrarian belt of Ebonyi, a pattern is forming. Governors, commissioners and elected officials of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) are issuing threats. Some speak of violence. Others speak of exclusion, of eviction, of political punishment. The language is different from place to place. The message is not. Support the party or face the consequences.
Nigerians are expected to go to the polls in barely four months. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has fixed January 16, 2027, for the presidential and National Assembly elections, with governorship and State Assembly polls to follow on February 6. Campaigning has not yet formally begun. Already, the rhetoric has turned dark.
Amnesty International Nigeria has taken notice. So has the Nigeria Democratic Congress (NDC). Opposition figures in at least two states have gone further, formally notifying security agencies of threats made against their candidates.
A deliberate pattern is taking shape
It began, most recently, in Maiduguri. Sainna Buba, Borno State’s Commissioner for Youth and Sports Development, stood before a crowd gathered to back President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s re-election. He did not mince words. Residents who refused to support the APC in 2027, he warned, would have their fingers cut off. They would be flogged. Welfare packages, he added, would go to loyalists alone.
The video immediately went viral. Amnesty International Nigeria called the remarks reckless and unlawful, and demanded an urgent investigation. No citizen, the organisation insisted, should be punished for a political choice in a democracy. Buba did not back down. He told party faithful to brace for more attacks from the opposition as the election drew closer.
Weeks earlier, a different threat had surfaced in Kuje, on the edge of the Federal Capital Territory. Samuel Danjuma Shekwolo, chairman of the area council, told residents plainly: Back the APC, or leave. Amnesty International Nigeria termed it a call to violence, an assault on the basic right to associate freely. The organisation later complained that, long after the video went viral, nobody appeared to have been held to account. The chairman’s chief protocol officer went further still, warning residents unwilling to support the President that Kuje should not be regarded as their home.
In Ebonyi State, the threats have come from the very top. Governor Francis Nwifuru has twice been reported using language opposition figures consider coercive. In June, a civil society coalition, the Ebonyi Political Think-Tank, accused him of threatening the opposition’s governorship candidate at a rally. The group notified the police, the Department of State Services (DSS) and the army, warning that the governor would be held personally responsible for any harm that followed.
More recently, addressing newly sworn in council chairmen, the governor made his position clear. No seat would be surrendered to the opposition. No opposition activity would be tolerated.
Then, there is Osun. Ahead of the state’s August 15 governorship election, Senator Francis Fadahunsi told his supporters what to do if they crossed paths with members of the rival Accord. Kill them, he said. The Accord campaign council called it an open incitement to violence and demanded his prosecution. Police invited the senator for questioning. His office later insisted the word had been used metaphorically, that he meant only defeat at the ballot box. The clarification came too late. The story had already taken over the campaign.
It would be wrong to suggest only the ruling party has reached for dangerous language. Opposition governors in the South West, among them Seyi Makinde of Oyo and Ademola Adeleke of Osun, have invoked the memory of the violent 1983 electoral crisis as a warning against rigging.
Rights groups have not treated those remarks in the same category as the threats above. They were not aimed at named individuals.
Lessons from 2023 polls
The 2023 general election left at least 39 people dead, according to compiled media and police reports. The victims included police officers, party loyalists, ordinary voters, even an electoral worker struck by a stray bullet. Among the dead was Oyibo Chukwu, the Labour Party’s senatorial candidate for Enugu East, shot and burned by unidentified gunmen days before the presidential vote. His party’s presidential candidate, Peter Obi, mourned him publicly.
The build-up to that election followed a familiar script. Researchers at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project recorded dozens of violent incidents targeting party supporters, candidates and electoral officials in the months before the vote. Atrocities Watch Africa and Global Rights counted at least 30 killings and 15 abductions of candidates and politically exposed persons in January 2023 alone, along with six attacks on campaign rallies. Alhassan Ado Doguwa, then the APC’s House of Representatives Majority Leader for Kano, had warned before the vote that those who refused to support the party would face trouble. He was later charged over election day violence that killed three of his own constituents. He was never convicted.
Even smaller, off-cycle elections, held outside the national calendar and generally considered easier to secure, have not escaped this pattern. Kogi’s 2019 governorship contest brought killings, ballot box snatching and the murder of a PDP women’s leader, her home burnt by thugs loyal to the state’s ruling party. Edo and Ondo followed a year later and stayed largely peaceful, helped by peace pacts signed between rivals. But by November 2023, the pattern was back.
Kogi, Imo and Bayelsa all held governorship elections marked, in the words of the Centre for Democracy and Development, by vote buying and pockets of violence, despite a heavy security presence. This year’s Osun contest, the very election that produced Senator Fadahunsi’s remark, brought fresh accusations. The PDP, and separately former President Goodluck Jonathan, alleged that the APC had bussed in thugs from other states.
The Nigeria Civil Society Situation Room estimates that 626 people were killed in violence linked to the 2019 election cycle. In 2015, the figure was 106. Observer groups point to that trajectory as evidence of a country moving in the wrong direction, not the right one.
The danger ahead
Campaigning for the presidential and National Assembly race will take proper shape by November. The governorship campaigns follow soon after. Observers are already naming the places to watch.
Ebonyi is one. A sitting governor has twice been accused of threatening language, and the state heads into a contested race. Osun is another. The rivalry between the APC and Accord did not end with August’s election, and tempers there remain raw. Borno and the wider North East demand attention too. The commissioner’s threats have gone unretracted, and existing insecurity in the region could sharpen the effect of political intimidation on voters already reluctant to turn out.
The Federal Capital Territory joins the list, its councils still shadowed by the Kuje controversy. The pattern seen in Kogi, Imo, Bayelsa and Osun suggests that Nigeria’s off-cycle states remain vulnerable, whatever their smaller size and tighter security cover.
On August 18, Nigeria’s major political parties signed a National Peace Accord, pledging peaceful, issue-based campaigning ahead of 2027. Several of the incidents described here happened after that pledge was made. The police have opened at least one formal inquiry, into the Borno commissioner’s remarks. Osun’s police command questioned Senator Fadahunsi separately. Neither process has produced a public outcome yet.
The next four months is expected to show whether words spoken today become the violence of tomorrow, or whether the country will find a way to keep its politics as a contest of votes, not threats.
