The All Progressives Congress ( APC) on 22nd August, 2026,released names of the members of its 2027 presidential campaingn council chaired by President Bola AhmedTinubu, GCFR.. The huge list contains names of senators, governors, aides, party grandees, and, curiously, serving heads of federal agencies. Vice President Kashim Shettima and APC National Chairman Nentawe Yilwatda sit as vice-chairmen. Former Zamfara state governor Abdulaziz Yari is Director-General. Imo State Governor Hope Uzodimma is secretary. On paper, it is a formidable coalition of experience and reach. In practice, it is a roll call that raises a question the party has not adequately answered: how can people accused of corruption populate a presidential campaign council, and what message does that send?
Consider who is on it. Betta Edu, suspended as Minister of Humanitarian Affairs in January 2024 over allegations of financial malfeasance, has been named Director of Women’s Mobilisation. This is a minister whose suspension triggered a six-week freeze of programmes under the National Social Investment Programme Authority, whose ministry the EFCC says it recovered N30 billion from, and whose case is still not closed in the public mind. She is back, this time to mobilise women for the very government that suspended her.
Ngozi Olejeme, former board chairperson of the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund, is also on the list. She is currently facing an EFCC probe over an alleged N1 billion money-laundering case. That is not a rumour from the opposition. That is an active investigation. And yet here she is, campaigning for a government whose anti-corruption agency is investigating her.
Then there is the Director-General himself. Abdulaziz Yari’s record includes EFCC arrests in 2021 and 2022 over alleged financial misappropriation, and his name has surfaced in an ₦84 billion fraud probe connected to a suspended Accountant-General, with reports alleging that ₦22 billion benefited him through a linked company. This is not a peripheral appointment. This is the operational head of the entire campaign machinery.
What message are we sending?
We are sending the message that allegations do not matter as long as loyalty is proven. We are sending the message that an EFCC file is not a disqualification, only a delay. We are sending the message that the fight against corruption, which this administration has repeatedly claimed to champion, bends whenever the people under investigation are useful to the party.
And then there is the matter that should trouble every Nigerian regardless of party colour: the inclusion of officials in charge of our personal data.
Abisoye Coker-Odusote, Director-General of the National Identity Management Commission, has been named Director of Data Management for the campaign council. Kashifu Inuwa Abdullahi, Director-General of the National Information Technology Development Agency, sits beside her as deputy in the same directorate. These are not minor bureaucrats. NIMC holds the National Identification Number database of nearly every adult Nigerian. NITDA is the country’s data protection regulator, the very body meant to police how our information is used and by whom.
We must all flinch at what consequences could follow. Analysts have been careful to say there is no evidence that NIMC’s database has been transferred to the APC, and that caution is right and necessary. But a campaign council is not a court of law. It runs on perception, and perception here is damning enough on its own. What happens when the custodian of the national identity register also sits on the data desk of a partisan campaign? What confidence can a citizen have that the register used to verify their vote, their bank account, their SIM card, remains untouched by political ambition? The question does not require proof of wrongdoing to be worth asking. It requires only the plain fact of the appointment.
We also have the people in charge of revenue generation on the council. Zacch Adedeji, Executive Chairman of the Nigeria Revenue Service, has reportedly been named Deputy Director of Fundraising. This boggles the mind. The man responsible for assessing and collecting the taxes of every working Nigerian is now, in the same season, responsible for raising campaign funds for the ruling party. What intention does that serve, if not to blur the line between the machinery of the state and the machinery of the party that controls it?
This is the pattern. Financial officials with corruption questions hanging over them. Identity and data officials pulled into partisan service. Revenue officials doubling as fundraisers. Each appointment, taken alone, might be explained away. Taken together, they describe a governing party that no longer sees a meaningful boundary between the state it administers and the campaign it is running.
Does the APC understand what it has done? Does it understand that a campaign council built this way answers, before a single rally is held, the question voters will ask in January 2027: has anything actually changed?
A party is free to campaign on its record. But it forfeits the right to campaign on integrity when it hands sensitive roles to people still answering to the EFCC, still under ICPC questioning, still carrying unresolved allegations from their time in government. Senator Godswill Akpabio, now Deputy Director-General of the council, has his own history of unresolved allegations from his time as Akwa Ibom governor. Femi Gbajabiamila, the President’s Chief of Staff and a senior council member, was reportedly questioned by the ICPC as recently as July 2026. These are not obscure names dredged up by political enemies. These are men and women whose files are open, whose questions are pending, and whose presence on this council the APC chose, deliberately, with full knowledge of their records.
The ordinary Nigerian voter does not read EFCC charge sheets. But they notice patterns. They notice when the people meant to safeguard their data, their taxes, and public funds are the same people asked to campaign for those in power. And they will ask, quietly but firmly, whether a government that cannot police its own campaign council can be trusted to police anything else.
That is the moral question this council must answer, not with a press statement, but with conduct between now and January 2027.