The Nigeria Democratic Congress says its presidential, National Assembly, governorship and state assembly primaries will still hold nationwide on May 29, even as it tightens the rules around who gets to move forward in the race for the 2027 general elections.
Only aspirants who emerge successful in the primaries will pay nomination fees, the party said, adding that May 28 has been set aside for arrivals, documentation with electoral and security authorities, consultative engagements and other preparatory activities. The party also said no government agency, including the Police, INEC or DSS, is expected to take part in any meetings or activities scheduled for that day, and that any action outside the approved guidelines will be treated as unauthorised.
Henry Seriake Dickson said on Wednesday that the sequence for May 29 would begin with presidential affirmation, followed by National Assembly primaries or affirmation, State Assembly primaries or affirmation, and governorship primaries or affirmation. All results from the exercise, he said, will be collated and sent to the party’s national headquarters, where the National Working Committee will formally announce the outcomes. No state executive or committee has authority to declare results on its own.
The timetable lands as the NDC tries to draw a hard line around an exercise that has already been shadowed by suspicion over who is really running under its banner. Osa Director said on Thursday that the party had identified aspirants it believed were being sponsored by the APC and confronted them during screening. He said the party would not allow anyone to ride on the popularity and alliance of Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso to win election.
Director said the lesson came from the Labour Party’s 2023 experience, when several aspirants joined Labour Party and the NNPP during the buildup to the election, only for many of them to later dump those parties for the APC months after the vote. He said the NDC had seen a fresh rush of applicants, especially people from the diaspora who had never taken part in politics before, and that the party would examine pedigree, commitment and political history before issuing tickets. “If you don’t have a verifiable pedigree and commitment to the party, to the principles and values that the party is espousing, then you are not going to pick a ticket and fly the flag of the NDC,” he said.
That warning is the real point of the May 29 exercise. The party is not just picking candidates; it is trying to stop its platform from becoming a shortcut for people with no long-term attachment to it. Dickson said only successful aspirants would proceed to pay nomination fees and complete documentation, a move meant to keep the final list tied to the screening process rather than to late pressure from powerful backers.
Director said some of the aspirants the party had confronted already knew they were not getting the ticket because, in his words, they were “moles planted in the party.” He added that the NDC was “not following the playbook of the Labour Party,” and said the party was learning from the mistakes of the past. By May 29, the test will be whether that screening holds and whether the NDC can keep its primaries from producing the same kind of defections it says it is trying to avoid.
