APC and the Fear of Winning Too Loudly
By Jerry Adesewo
APC: We now have 30 governors.
Nigerians: Wow.
APC: We also have 75 senators.
Nigerians: Omo.
APC: Over 230 members in the House of Representatives.
Nigerians: Na you dey hot.
APC: Not to brag, but we now have over 10 million registered members.
Nigerians: That’s very nice. Oya approve real-time transmission of electoral results, so the world can see you are winning because people love you.
APC: Haaa… that one is risky ooo.
Yes, risky!
Every WhatsApp group this anonymous conversation has landed in has split the room—some people cracking up with laughter, others pausing, squinting at their screens, and quietly asking, “How risky?”
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I wonder if anything else exposes the tension between confidence and credibility like a party that keeps announcing its numerical superiority but panics at the idea of transparent counting.
This, in essence, is the paradox of the . A party so dominant on paper that it now resembles a political monopoly, yet so nervous about real-time verification that it treats transparency like an allergic reaction.
By the numbers, APC is not just winning; it is owning the league. Thirty governors. A commanding presence in the National Assembly. A membership figure large enough to populate a small country. If politics were football, APC would be Bayern Munich in a league of amateurs.
So why the fear?
Why does a party that insists it is loved everywhere suddenly develop cold feet when asked to allow election results to be transmitted in real time? Why does numerical confidence evaporate the moment transparency knocks?
That is where the satire begins to write itself.
You cannot spend every press briefing counting your political trophies and then tremble at the idea of showing the scorecard live. You cannot tell Nigerians that the opposition has collapsed, defected, surrendered, or been absorbed—and then argue that real-time results transmission is “too risky.”
Risky to whom?
The argument usually comes dressed in official language: technical challenges, network issues, national security concerns, logistical realities. But Nigerians, well-trained by experience, hear something else entirely: “Please don’t look too closely while we are winning.”
This is the strange psychology of dominance without confidence.
APC wants to be seen as the party everyone is joining, but not necessarily as the party everyone is freely choosing—at least not under bright, uninterrupted light. It prefers applause in the dark, victory announced after the fact, and legitimacy explained rather than demonstrated.
Yet the irony is brutal: real-time transmission of results is not a threat to a popular party. It is an advertisement. If ten million people truly love you, transparency should be your loudest campaign jingle.
Instead, transparency is treated like a wild animal—best admired from a distance.
The deeper problem is what this posture says about Nigerian democracy. When one party becomes this dominant, the system requires more openness, not less. A near–one-party landscape without radical transparency begins to look less like popularity and more like inevitability. And inevitability is the enemy of democracy.
Nigerians are not asking APC to lose. They are asking APC to win properly. To win so clearly, so openly, so verifiably that even the losers can only sigh and move on. They are asking for the kind of victory that does not need post-election press conferences to explain it.
After all, what is the point of having 30 governors if you are afraid of live results? Why boast about 75 senators if the arithmetic must be done behind curtains? Why count millions of members if counting votes in real time induces anxiety?
At some point, the bragging begins to sound defensive.
The fear of real-time results transmission exposes a quiet truth: dominance built on defections, political gravity, and elite migration is not the same as dominance built on enthusiastic consent. One fills offices. The other fills ballot boxes—live, on camera, without excuses.
Until APC reconciles its numerical confidence with procedural courage, Nigerians will keep applauding politely and then asking the same inconvenient question:
If you are truly this popular… why are you afraid to let us watch you win?
In Jollof terms, it’s simple:
If the stew is sweet, open the pot.
APC and the Fear of Winning Too Loudly