ABUJA, Nigeria — President Bola Tinubu has secured the ruling All Progressives Congress presidential ticket for the 2027 general elections, sweeping to victory in a nationwide party primary.
Pius Anyim, the returning officer and chairman of the party’s presidential primary elections committee, announced the final result at the Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre in Abuja on Sunday, May 24, 2026, declaring that the president had received 10,999,162 votes from a total of 11,015,665 cast.
His sole challenger, Stanley Osifo, received 16,503 votes.
Of the 12,643,301 registered voters, some 11,069,756 were accredited across all 8,809 wards where polling took place on Saturday, 23 May.
“It is, therefore, my duty as returning officer for this primary election to declare President Bola Tinubu, having satisfied the guidelines, as the winner of the APC presidential primary election and hereby declare the presidential candidate of the APC,” Anyim said.
Tinubu subsequently received the party’s certificate of return and flag from the APC national chairman, Nentawe Yilwatda, in a ceremony attended by state governors, members of the National Executive Committee and National Working Committee, as well as lawmakers and senior party figures.
A product of new electoral law
The exercise was itself a consequence of legislation the president had signed into law.
The Electoral Act 2026, enacted in February, abolished indirect primaries and required parties to hold either consensus or direct primaries.
Saturday’s presidential vote was the culmination of a week-long sequence of APC primaries that also covered the House of Representatives, Senate, state assemblies, and governorships.
Tinubu’s acceptance speech
In his acceptance remarks, Tinubu cast the result as an expression of the party’s confidence in his leadership and pledged a second term defined by broader inclusion.
“I accept with profound humility and gratitude the nomination of our great party, the APC, to stand again as your presidential candidate in the 2027 election,” he said.
The president described watching much of the voting unfold on television from Lagos, where he had cast his own ballot at his ward in Ikoyi-Obalende that morning.
“I was glued to the television after voting. I saw the mammoth crowd in Kano and Kaduna, the city boy walking the streets of Calabar. It was a good feeling to see that there was no bloodshed, no rancour. This is politics in earnest. This is where we want Nigeria, facing one focus,” he said.
Reaching out to opponents and critics alike, Tinubu explicitly named Osifo in what he framed as an offer of reconciliation.
“To those who despise our philosophy, we offer dialogue and engagement, not anger, confident that the sincerity of our purpose and the result of our work will speak for themselves,” he said.
“Democracy is sustained not by uniformity but by diversity, by a shared belief in the nation, and the blending of ideas. I owe you no grudge, including Osifo, who spent his money.”
Tinubu also acknowledged the personal weight of the economic overhaul his administration has pursued since taking office in May 2023.
“I know what it takes to reform this nation we met in tatters. If you lost sleep, I’ve lost some too. If you’ve lost weight, I’ve lost some too. But I’ve always remembered one thing: in 2022, I asked for this job. You all supported me, and I got it. So I must do it,” he told the gathering.
Among the achievements he cited were the Nigerian Education Loan Fund, which he said had disbursed more than 282 billion naira to some 1.5 million beneficiaries; a presidential metering initiative that had supplied 2.5 million electricity metres nationwide; a four trillion naira bond programme to clear legacy debts owed to power-generating and gas companies; and peak power generation of 6,000 megawatts — a figure he said represented a 50 per cent improvement on what his administration inherited.
On security, Tinubu acknowledged persistent challenges while pledging intensified efforts. “I assure you that I take seriously the responsibility to safeguard the lives and property of every Nigerian,” he said, adding that the government had invested in intelligence, surveillance and modern equipment.
He also called on the legislature to act on a specific constitutional change.
“We also expect the National Assembly to amend the Constitution to allow the creation of state police as a matter of national emergency,” he said.
The challenger concedes
Osifo, who recorded zero votes in twelve states including the Federal Capital Territory, Delta, Borno and Kaduna, but secured more than 5,248 votes in Niger State, said he accepted the outcome without reservation.
“I’m okay with the outcome of the results. And I’m working with the party, I’m working with the candidate of the party as well. I have no problem with it,” he told a correspondent shortly after the results were declared.
Osifo pushed back against any framing of his candidacy as a direct challenge to the president.
“We are one party, we are members of the All Progressives Congress, we are one family,” he said, describing the exercise as an orderly internal process for selecting a standard-bearer.
He indicated the experience had not dampened longer-term ambitions: “I am a very young man. I have a lot of years ahead of me, so it’s possible for things to happen.”
The party chairman’s verdict
Professor Yilwatda used the occasion to argue that the APC had consolidated its standing as Nigeria’s dominant political force, pointing to the scale of participation across the week’s primaries as evidence that rival parties could not match the ruling party’s reach or organisation.
“No other party would win the election because the numbers turning out are in the thousands. Believe me, no political party can showcase one-tenth of what we presented in their own congresses,” he said.
Yilwatda acknowledged that complaints had followed some of the exercises, but said the party possessed well-established mechanisms for resolving disputes and was deploying a reconciliation committee, led by Yobe State Governor Mai Mala Buni, to address grievances at both state and national levels.
He also dismissed videos circulating online that purported to show irregularities during the primaries, saying the footage predated the exercises and bore no APC branding.
“These are unverified videos and were not even meant for our party activities,” he said.
