By
 Prof. Mike Ikhariale

The elections which took place at the Federal Capital Territory on the 21st of February, 2026 were supposed to be simple a municipal exercise but it however managed to acquire significant national and global attention because it was made to look like a test run for the forthcoming 2027 general election.

First, it was over-hyped by the opposition and their media megaphones who wanted to project their capacity and readiness to upstage the ruling APC which they have unanimously adjudged as politically expired under the weight of its own massive failure in governance. The election debates were framed as a decisive referendum on the rul­ing party which the opposition parties and their many allied media analysts alongside the ubiquitous social media matadors en­thusiastically flying the ‘Obedient’ banner who have equally adjudged the ruling par­ty as having failed and therefore no longer capable of winning any election again in Nigeria, beginning with the FCT elections.

This over-confident mindset led some key opposition figures who are current­ly gasping for national attention to jump into the council elections fray and started campaigning actively for their candidates especially those competing under the Afri­ca Democratic Congress, ADC. Prominent amongst these high-profile politicians were Peter Obi, Rotimi Amaechi and the Turaki himself, Atiku Abubakar.

Also, the Minister of the FCT contribut­ed to the unusual attention that the election attracted with his typical boisterous and dismissive attitude towards the opposition which he boasted as having no electoral chance in the federal capital in view of his own overwhelming performances in office and if sterling performances in office is a barometer for gauging acceptability by the voters, then, there should really be no meaningful challenge to him because of the abundant evidence to back up his demand for an election quid pro quo from the voters of the FCT under his famous transactional clincher of “I do for you, you do for me”.

The results have since been released. The APC surprisingly won 5 chairmanship slots out of a possible 6 while the PDP picked the remaining slot in the Gwagwalada area council but the ADC scoring zero. Those who are familiar with the dynamics of contemporary PDP internal politics are whispering that even the victorious PDP chairmanship candidate for Gwagwalada is a member of the Wike’s faction of the cur­rently fractured PDP, a development which seems to give credence to the operational efficacy of Wike’s self-styled “rainbow co­alition.”

Elections are generally a contest amongst Nigeria’s ever-optimistic political elite who never countenance the possibil­ity of losing, no matter how unprepared or how starkly impassable the electoral path confronting them is. So, post-election disputations have become the norm but it is expected that at some point, the reason­able contestant would know when to yield to common sense, systemic decency and the preservation of globally cherished ethos and then move on, looking forward to the next election.

Unfortunately, it is now the vogue in the Trump political world which is character­ised by rabid election denialism in which candidates, even if beaten silly, would still go ahead to strenuously dispute the out­comes with the hope of a judicial miracle occurring by raking up all possible reasons to invalidate, sometimes to undermine the credibility of the results, with the more sin­ister effect of eventually delegitimizing the mandates of their opponents who probably won fairly.

Partisan commentators have been harp­ing on the fact that the FCT election suffered from an incredibly low turnout and as such it cannot be credible. True, election turnout in Nigeria is generally low due to acute lack of adequate public enlightenment about the civic imperatives of voting at democratic elections but the critical point these nattery nabob of negativism seems to be missing is the fact that previous turnouts at simi­lar elections were not substantially better. Particularly with respect to the FCT, this last election actually recorded more voters turnout than in the recent past.

Consider the glaring statistics on this matter: “since 2019, only about 19.7% of reg­istered voters in Bwari went to the polls, and a mere 11.5% in the AMAC district. In 2022, the problem persisted as the turnout was abysmally poor, with only about 9% of registered voters coming out to vote”.

If as reported by INEC that they actu­ally recorded slightly above 15 % turnout rate this time around, then contrary to the media delegitimizing blitzkrieg about “low turnout”, it is actually the highest in recent years but the misleading “low turnout” nar­rative acquired so much traction because no one has bothered to fact check those vu­vuzela mischief makers.

There is however the stunning fact that most Nigerians register as “voters” just to get the permanent voters’ cards (PVC) which they use mainly as a form of ID during official transactions. Turnout is also low due to the negative media analysts who tend to scare people away from polling stations by their incessant doomsday tales about the voting system in Nigeria.

WINNERS

Elections are meant to be won or lost and the FCT election did produce both categories for the actual contestants and collaterally for those who sought to use the occasion as their political launchpad and burnish their ambitions by storming Abuja for cheap media visibility, the city being the epicenter of Nigeria’s political universe, more so, as they sought to use it as a test ground for 2027.

APC, the ruling party, following the notorious precedent already set in local government elections across the country that are usually won handsomely by the government in power, it won but not as much as the routine hundred % victory re­cords that we are used to getting whenever state governors conduct local government elections within their domains.
Another major winner is the FCT minister, Nyesom Wike, whose political stock has risen astronomically overnight. Wike won big and in the process, debunked the emergent myth that Governors do not have the powers to influence elections in their localities as being aggressively ped­dled lately. Wike did not just deliver on his promise, he actually “peppered ‘em” with his incumbency as the FCT landlord and his peculiar personal political dexterity which he prefers to call “capacity”, a fact which the President himself also acknowl­edged in his congratulatory note to Wike “for a job well done.”
Democracy as a system of government also had a reprieve in spite of the dooms­day prophesies about the election that were incessantly spewing from some suborned TV anchormen who seem to arrogate to themselves Aristotelian superiority even in the face of their evident political naivety or obscene bias. On the contrary, the elec­tion which was mislabeled as a “failure” by some CSOs and their spokespersons and a conspiratorial pool of skewed spin-doctors was actually reasonably peaceful and or­derly with security arrangements at their best just to justify the dollars grants which they collect from deeply-agenda-ed foreign donor agencies.
LOSERS

First, the armchair social media an­chormen who spent the greater part of the time spreading misleading information that were laced with tendentious looming “threats to democracy” over the pending election, very much like those mouthful weathermen on American TV stations who enthusiastically analyse and predict stormy bad weathers with uncommon stri­dency.
Second, the ADC party and its snake oil salespersons who were loudly promis­ing electoral miracles. Top on that list are Peter Obi, Amaechi, Bolaji Abdullahi, Ati­ku Abubakar and, of course, Senator Ireti Kingigbe, whose chances of returning to the senate from the FCT now appears to be very slim, if the FCT results and those from Rivers and Kano states where the ADC did woefully are anything to go by.
Third, competitive party politics has, no doubt, been dented by the bitter and largely disparaging attitude towards the election through needless misinformation from both sides of the political divide, namely the ruling party and the opposition.
Democracy in Nigeria has been turned into a game of insult and mutually assured destruction which has in turn alienated de­cent people from the electoral process.

Finally, it would seem as if the FCT re­sults, though local, have prematurely sunk the hopes of many would-be presidential candidates. They can no longer say that local election losses do not matter because of the intensive way they tried to use it to project their preparedness for 2027 by mak­ing such a big deal out of it and that much was the impression which they actively gave to both their local and international audiences who probably saw them ending up as mere political Paper Tigers.