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From Godwin Tsa, Abuja
As Governor Hyacinth Alia heads towards a re-election bid, the real contest may be happening inside his own party. Seven months from Benue State’s 2027 governorship election, the defining fact of the race isn’t a rising opposition candidate or a groundswell against the incumbent. It’s a ruling party that cannot stop in-fighting.
Governor Hyacinth Iormem Alia enters the contest with what should be an unassailable position: a certified APC governorship ticket, control of the state’s party apparatus and a development record his camp is prepared to defend on its merits. Yet the story of Benue politics in 2026 has not been about Alia’s standing with voters. It has been about a running battle with Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Sen. George Akume, a fight that has moved from backroom grumbling to open warfare over party structures, National Assembly tickets, and, now, by some accounts, quiet coordination with the opposition itself.
Alia and Akume once needed one another. Their partnership delivered a landslide victory for the ruling party in 2023: Akume’s institutional weight and federal connections combined with Alia’s outsider appeal to sweep Benue for APC. Three years on, that alliance is remembered less for what it built than for what it became, one of the fiercest political feuds in Benue’s recent history.
The two men have tried, publicly, to paper over the differences. In May 2026, they announced a formal reconciliation following a peace meeting convened to settle disagreements ahead of the party primaries. It didn’t take. Within weeks, political analysts were noting that the aftermath of the reconciliation had not yielded much result, with both camps still scheming against each other. By July, Alia’s loyalists were defecting to Akume’s camp, and Akume was reportedly attending the birthday celebration of one of them in Abuja, alongside Michael Aondoakaa, the man now positioned as PDP’s standard-bearer against Alia. That detail alone tells you how blurred the lines between “APC infighting” and “opposition alliance” have become in Benue.
Alia’s position rests on one indisputable fact: he won his party’s nomination decisively. In the May 2026 governorship primary, he polled 367,786 votes against Terwase Orbunde’s 3,247, not a contest but a coronation. Whatever resistance exists to his leadership within APC, it did not translate into a viable primary challenge. But the governorship ticket turned out to be the one prize Akume’s camp couldn’t take. Everything below it was contested, and much of it was overturned.
In the immediate aftermath of the National Assembly primaries, Alia’s loyalists appeared to have swept the field, with Gabriel Suswam defeating incumbent Senator Emmanuel Udende in Benue North-East and Benjamin Aber (husband of the state’s Secretary to the Government) defeating Senator Titus Zam in Benue North-West. Those results were heavily celebrated by the governor’s loyalists as proof of Alia’s dominance.
They didn’t survive the appeals process. In July, the APC’s National Working Committee, acting on recommendations from its Primary Election Appeal Committee, reversed both outcomes, reinstating Udende and Zam, both considered Akume loyalists, and unwinding results across five House of Representatives constituencies as well. Those affected were perceived loyalists of the governor, while those who gained were aligned with Akume, according to one analysis of the shake-up. The reversal is widely read not as a technical correction but as a demonstration of where Akume’s real power lies: not in Makurdi, but in Abuja, at the level of the national party machinery that Alia cannot easily out-organise.
The result is a Benue APC that will contest 2027 as two armies under one flag: Alia’s camp holding seven major National Assembly tickets, Akume’s camp holding seven of its own, an even split that guarantees the factional fight continues into the National Assembly regardless of who wins the governorship.
Akume-Alia is the central axis, but it isn’t the only one. Senator Abba Moro’s public friction with the governor represents a second, more localised front in Benue South, one that insiders warn could compound the damage, if it merges with the Akume-aligned bloc rather than staying a separate grievance. Reports have also alleged Akume forming a working alliance with former governor Samuel Ortom, who leads a rival PDP-aligned structure in Zone B, effectively giving the anti-Alia forces a foothold that spans both the ruling party and the opposition.
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This is the backdrop against which the reported Aondoakaa-Ortom-Akase-Moro-Zam-Udende coalition has to be read. It is less a unified opposition front than a convergence of separate grievances, some inside APC, some in PDP, that happen to share a common target. Reports have gone further, alleging that Akume and his associates were pooling financial resources to fund PDP State House of Assembly candidates, aiming to secure a legislative majority capable of controlling or impeaching Governor Alia if their plot to stop his re-election fails. That allegation remains unconfirmed, and Akume’s camp has not publicly owned it, but its circulation among “Benue stakeholders” willing to go on record with it is itself a measure of how deep the mistrust runs.
The honest answer is uncertain, and the factors that will decide it are less about which side has better ward-level structure than the 2023 result suggests they should be. It’s tempting to lean on the structural gap: PDP’s Benue machine remains more patchwork than unified, spread across the Ortom bloc, legacy PDP figures, and Aondoakaa’s more recent entry into the party’s frame, while Alia’s camp controls wards, local governments, and state APC structures. But that comparison has to reckon with an inconvenient precedent. Samuel Ortom held exactly that kind of built out, eight year deep PDP structure in 2023 and still lost decisively to Alia, a political outsider with no comparable machine of his own. Structure alone did not save Ortom, which means it cannot be assumed to save or doom anyone in 2027 either.
What actually decided 2023 looks less like a structure story and more like a convergence of three things. Ortom was an unpopular two-term incumbent weighed down by security failures and economic strain, an anti-incumbency dynamic Aondoakaa, as a challenger, doesn’t carry. Ortom’s own coalition was reportedly fractured by his endorsement of Peter Obi and the Labour Party in the presidential race, effectively working against his own party’s gubernatorial ticket rather than for it. And APC nationally was riding a defection wave and Tinubu cycle momentum that gave Alia a tailwind well beyond anything Benue-specific.
None of those three conditions is guaranteed to recur in 2027, and at least two currently look reversed: it’s APC, not PDP, dealing with the internal fracture this cycle, and there’s no comparable national wave in evidence yet. That reframes the real question for Aondoakaa’s chances. It isn’t simply whether PDP can out-organise APC at the ward level: Ortom’s experience suggests that’s not sufficient either way. It’s whether APC’s current dysfunction acts as 2027’s version of the anti-incumbency and fragmentation that sank Ortom in 2023, this time working against the ruling party rather than for it. If the Alia-Akume rift deepens into the kind of self-sabotage Ortom inflicted on his own ticket, structure won’t matter much for either side; the election will turn on who imploded more. If it’s contained, Alia’s institutional advantages, the intact governorship ticket and state-level party control, likely reassert themselves regardless of how well Aondoakaa’s coalition organises on paper.
There’s still a message problem worth keeping in mind. If Akume, a sitting SGF in a Tinubu APC government, is genuinely Aondoakaa’s chief backer, that’s an awkward position for a PDP candidate to run from, and gives Alia’s campaign an easy line about who’s really underwriting the “opposition.” That detail survives the revision: it remains a live liability regardless of which side the structural argument favours.
Strip away the factional manoeuvring and there’s a genuine argument underway about what Alia’s three plus years in office add up to. His supporters point to capital project spending, consistent salary and pension payments, agricultural interventions, and infrastructure development as the metrics that should matter most, framing his tenure as one of the state’s most development focused since Aper Aku’s industrial era. They cite grassroots gestures, such as retirees and commercial motorcyclists reportedly contributing towards his nomination form, as evidence of organic support that exists independent of party structure.
Critics within his own party make a different, and in Nigerian state politics a familiar, argument: that governance metrics alone don’t sustain a governor through a hostile primary and a general election if the patronage networks that build and defend party structure go unfed. It is a real tension, not merely a complaint from the aggrieved. Incumbents who prioritise visible delivery over structural patronage have, in other states and other cycles, lost control of their own machines regardless of their record in office.
Put together, Benue in 2026 is not a state drifting towards opposition takeover. It’s a state where the ruling party’s dominance is real on paper and genuinely contested in practice, where the more consequential battle is being fought inside APC’s own structures rather than across party lines. Alia goes into February 2027 the stronger single actor: certified candidate, state machinery, a governing record his side is prepared to defend. What he does not have is a unified party behind him, and the July ticket reversals are a reminder that Akume’s leverage runs through Abuja as much as Makurdi, a channel Alia cannot easily close off before the election, and one that will likely persist into whatever government follows, whether Alia’s or someone else’s.
If Benue flips in 2027, the more probable story will not be that PDP built something stronger than APC. It will be that APC, given every structural advantage, could not stop dismantling itself in time to use it.
