In Naija politics, the most dangerous crack is never the one on the wall of the other party's building.

It is the one opening quietly in your own foundation while you are busy pointing at your neighbour.

The APC spent the first half of 2026 celebrating structural dominance. Thirty-one governors. Senate. House of Representatives. Presidential primary with 10.9 million votes. The national chairman who called the Osun contest a Keke Napep facing a Trailer. The party that was so confident of its machinery that it was literally mapping out which states it would recover before the 2027 general election.

Then came Ogun State.

And the party that has spent this election cycle mocking opposition factions, parallel conventions, rival NWCs, and court battles over legitimate leadership is now petitioning the Inspector-General of Police to arrest one of its own members for claiming to be its own candidate.

In a state it is supposed to own.

Five months before the presidential election.

How Ogun's APC Ticket Became a Legal Battlefield

Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, popularly known as Yayi, is a political heavyweight. He represents Ogun West in the Senate. He is a close Tinubu ally. His emergence as the APC governorship consensus candidate was announced on April 13 by Governor Dapo Abiodun at a strategic caucus meeting attended by former governors Olusegun Osoba, Ibikunle Amosun, and Gbenga Daniel, along with other governorship aspirants.

The word consensus does a lot of work in that sentence. Because one aspirant was notably absent from the meeting where he was being consensused out of the race.

Abayomi Semako Hunye is a former commissioner and immediate past Managing Director of the Ogun State Waste Management Authority. He is of Yewa extraction, the same geopolitical subgroup as Adeola, making the intra-Yewa dimension of the conflict an additional political sensitivity that nobody in the state's APC is publicly comfortable discussing.

Two weeks after Adeola was announced as consensus candidate, Hunye obtained the APC governorship nomination form through a third party in Abuja. He was screened, cleared, and assigned an aspirant number. He participated in the governorship primary.

The result announced by the electoral committee chairman Wale Ohu: Adeola 304,055 votes. Hunye zero votes.

Zero.

Not five. Not five hundred. Not fifty thousand fewer than Adeola in a state where he claims enormous local support.

Zero votes. In a state where he was cleared as a legitimate aspirant with an assigned number. Where he participated in the process. Where his agents were present at polling units across the state.

Hunye's campaign rejected the result before the announcement had even finished reverberating. His own collation showed 453,765 votes for him against 304,055 for Adeola.

Not a narrow dispute. Not a margin complaint. A complete inversion of the announced result, with Hunye claiming he won by nearly 150,000 votes in a primary that gave him zero.

The controversy over the conduct of the governorship primary of Ogun State chapter of the APC may be far from being over.

That is one of the more restrained descriptions of a situation where a man is claiming he won a primary by 150,000 votes and the party says he scored zero.

The Suspended Man Who Was Never Told He Was Suspended

Then came the APC national secretariat's response.

APC National Secretary Ajibola Basiru announced that Hunye had been suspended from the party, effective April 7, 2026, following allegations of activities considered injurious to the party, anti-party conduct, and actions capable of causing division.

Hunye's response demolished the announcement with a single question that nobody in the APC has satisfactorily answered.

He said: if he was suspended on April 7, how did the APC sell him a governorship nomination form after April 7? How did the APC screen and clear him as an aspirant after April 7? How did the APC assign him an aspirant number and allow him to participate in a governorship primary after April 7?

Hunye has continued to challenge the emergence of Senator Olamilekan Solomon Adeola as the party's candidate, with the dispute moving to court over alleged irregularities and disenfranchisement.

A suspended man who was sold a nomination form by the party that suspended him. Screened by the party that suspended him. Cleared by the party that suspended him. Given an aspirant number by the party that suspended him. And then recorded as having zero votes by the party that suspended him after all of that.

The APC's position produces a logical impossibility. Either the suspension happened before the form sale and the party knowingly sold a form to a suspended member, or the suspension was backdated to the period before the form sale to justify excluding him after the primary produced results they did not want him to see.

Both options are uncomfortable for a party that is supposed to be demonstrating institutional credibility ahead of January 2027.

The Police Petition That Escalated Everything

On August 24, the APC's Director of Administration Ayoola Peter Olajolo petitioned the Inspector-General of Police, Tunji Disu, and the DSS Director-General separately, demanding the investigation, arrest, and prosecution of Hunye.

The petition stated: "I write to bring to your urgent attention a grave threat to public peace and electoral integrity involving one Mr. Abayomi Hunye. The Subject has notoriously and unlawfully taken to the public domain, including print and social media, parading himself as the Governorship Candidate of our party for the forthcoming January 2027 election."

The APC accused Hunye of impersonation, conduct likely to cause a breach of peace, and violation of the Electoral Act.

Hunye responded with characteristic precision. He said he has never declared himself the officially recognised APC candidate. He said his position is that the matter is before the court and the court has not yet determined who the candidate is. He said: "Ogun State candidature of governorship election is still hanging at the court. The court is going to determine who becomes the candidate and the case is still on."

There is a legal distinction between saying "I am the APC candidate" and "the court has not yet decided who the APC candidate is." Hunye is making the second claim. The APC is treating it as the first.

Hunye issued a warning that the political crisis surrounding the party's 2027 governorship ticket could escalate far beyond the experience of the recently concluded Osun State governorship election.

He then did something that the APC should take seriously. He said he would work against Adeola if the dispute is not resolved to his satisfaction through the courts.

Work against. In the state that the APC is supposed to be defending as the President's critical South-West base.

The Abiodun PGF Connection and What It Means

Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State is the same governor who was recently accused, alongside Peter Mbah of Enugu, of attempting a palace coup inside the Progressive Governors Forum against Hope Uzodimma's chairmanship.

The Arewa Youth Forum issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Abiodun and Mbah, accusing them of sabotaging Tinubu's re-election.

Now the same Abiodun who announced Adeola as the consensus candidate is presiding over a state APC that is petitioning the IGP to arrest one of its own members and claiming a man who participated in its primary scored zero votes.

The pattern tells a story about how the APC manages its internal consensus arrangements. It is the same pattern visible in Gombe, where Pantami threatened to fight the consensus to his last breath. In Rivers, where the entire primary structure was legally invalidated. In the PGF, where the campaign fund controversy produced two rival governor factions at a meeting in the same night.

The APC's structural narrative, that thirty-one governors equals unbreakable cohesion, is being tested in Ogun the same week the opposition is holding its single-candidate summit in Abuja.

What Osun Proved That Ogun Must Reckon With

The APC's national chairman said Osun was a Keke Napep facing a Trailer. The Keke Napep won.

It won because APC's internal fractures, the Wike-Fubara war, the Oyetola ministerial factor, the Oyinlola miscalculation, were visible enough for Adeleke to navigate.

Ogun is not Osun. The political geography is different. Adeola is a senator with genuine Ogun political weight. Abiodun is finishing his term with a functioning administrative structure behind him.

But a man who claims to have won a primary by 150,000 votes and was recorded at zero, who is now unveiling a running mate, who is before a Federal High Court, who is promising to work against the official candidate, and who is from the same Yewa subregion as the official candidate, is not a small crack.

He is a man who knows exactly which stones to pull from which parts of the Yewa structure to make things difficult in that zone.

And in Ogun State's presidential election context, where Tinubu needs the South-West to deliver maximum votes on January 16, a fractured Ogun APC is a genuine problem.

Not an existential one. But a real one.

Is This the Beginning of the End for the APC Empire?

No. Not yet.

The APC has thirty-one governors and a structural advantage that one state's primary dispute cannot unravel overnight. Hunye's case is before a Federal High Court that may or may not move quickly enough to affect the January election. Adeola's name has been submitted to INEC. The machinery of the party is formally behind him.

But here is what the Ogun crisis joins.

The PFIPC ghost agency. The PGF N800 billion campaign fund dispute. The Gbajabiamila BCDA standoff where a government appointment sat three weeks without implementation. The Pantami Gombe consensus rejection. The Oshiomhole-Akpabio Senate war. The APC deregistering its own Osun operation when the national chairman called it a Trailer and the Trailer lost.

None of these individually collapses the APC. Combined, they describe a ruling party that is experiencing the classical symptoms of a dominant party that has absorbed too many individual ambitions without enough structural discipline to manage them all simultaneously.

The APC of 2013 that removed Jonathan was a lean, disciplined, purpose-built coalition. The APC of 2026 is a hotel where every political ambition in Nigeria checked in and nobody agreed on check-out time.

That is not the same party. And in Naija politics, it does not always produce the same result.

What do you think? Can Adeola win the Ogun governorship in January while Hunye is still before a Federal High Court claiming he won the primary by 150,000 votes and threatening to work against him? And does the pattern of APC internal crises across Ogun, Gombe, Rivers, the PGF, and the Senate tell you that the ruling party's structural advantages are more fragile than the thirty-one governors number suggests? Drop your thoughts in the comments. Today is September 2, 2026. This is Naija politics and the ruling party's most comfortable state is showing cracks in the wall that nobody on the APC's communications team wants to discuss.