By Joseph Odok, PhD Esq.
Nigeria’s new electoral regime was designed to make political parties more accountable, their membership more transparent, and the nomination of candidates less vulnerable to manipulation. The controversy surrounding Zana Akpagu’s lies and fabrication of his movement from the African Democratic Congress (ADC) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) deserves to be examined not merely as another episode of Cross River politics, but against the stricter legal architecture created by the Electoral Act 2026.
The central question is simple: did Zana Akpagu’s resignation from ADC to PDP comply with the membership-register requirements of the new law, or does the documentary trail reveal a political strategy designed to preserve alternative routes to a nomination?
Certain facts must be strengthened at this point. Zana has maintained dual membership of both ADC and PDP till date. When the e-registration exercise started, he knowingly registered in ADC and PDP to have options in case he loses the primaries. Zana shot himself in the leg when, unknown to him, ADC submitted their register on 18 March while PDP submitted theirs on 24 April. This has been confirmed by INEC as a public institution and through its records. Zana’s resignation letter from ADC carries the date 26 April, which has a digital footprint posted by himself on the ADC WhatsApp group, with a lot of people to testify to this fact.
READ ALSO: Minister seeks grassroots partnerships to empower women
Recall that a court ruling that created a crisis in ADC created a faction between the State Exco and the David Mark-led NWC. This created a communication gap between the ADC SWC and NWC. I have authoritatively verified that Zana was caught up by this crisis and his resignation was mere noise and propaganda, with his name not transmitted to the NWC for onward forwarding to the INEC e-register. As of today, INEC does not have any record of his resignation communicated to them by the ADC NWC, and the ADC NWC does not have any record of his resignation letter from his ward. A written request to INEC has confirmed all of this. The worst part is that at the time of Zana’s fake resignation from ADC, there were no existing ward executives because the court rendered all congresses non-existent at that time.
Besides the issue of double membership of both ADC and PDP, public propaganda by Zana to create a false sense of resignation establishes that he defected from ADC in a letter dated 26 April 2026. That date is significant because the Electoral Act 2026 introduced a fundamentally different conception of party membership. Section 77(2) requires political parties to maintain digital membership registers containing detailed information about their members. More importantly, Section 77(4) requires the register to be submitted to INEC not later than 21 days before the party primary, congress, or convention. Section 77(5) then provides that only persons whose names appear on the submitted register are eligible to vote or be voted for, while Section 77(6) prohibits a party from using another register.
INEC subsequently confirmed that all 22 registered political parties had submitted their membership registers by 8 May 2026, following an extension of the Commission’s earlier deadline. INEC stressed that the registers would undergo verification. This makes the chronology surrounding Akpagu particularly important. His ADC resignation was dated 26 April. Yet his PDP candidacy emerged from the party’s primary process shortly afterwards. If the documents reportedly obtained from INEC establish that his name appeared simultaneously in the ADC and PDP registers submitted to the Commission, the matter moves beyond ordinary political realignment. It becomes a question about the integrity and legal effect of the statutory membership records.
There is another important legal development. On 24 September 2026, the Supreme Court restored Sections 77(5), 77(6), 77(7), and 84(2) of the Electoral Act 2026 after the Court of Appeal had invalidated them. The apex court held that the provisions were not inconsistent with the Constitution. That judgment gives renewed significance to the membership-register question. The law is no longer merely an administrative guideline. The Supreme Court has affirmed the legal force of the relevant provisions. The strongest criticism of Akpagu, therefore, is not that he changed political parties. Politicians are entitled to change parties. Nor is resignation from ADC itself suspicious. The issue is that the documentary sequence demonstrates that he remained recorded as an ADC member while simultaneously positioning himself within PDP in circumstances governed by the new statutory register regime.
Supporting documents have established that dual registration existed; the question becomes unavoidable: why maintain two political identities during an electoral process whose central reform was precisely to eliminate uncertainty about who legitimately belongs to a party? That is where the desperation enters the political argument. A politician anxious to preserve every possible route to a ticket may be tempted to keep multiple options alive until the last possible moment. But the new Electoral Act was designed to make such political manoeuvring increasingly difficult. Legitimacy in a democracy does not rest on ambition alone. It rests on compliance with rules that apply equally to the ambitious and the ordinary.
The lesson of the Akpagu controversy is therefore larger than one candidate or one constituency. The Electoral Act 2026 has raised the evidentiary standard of Nigerian party politics. Membership must mean something. Registers must mean something. Deadlines must mean something.
And if the documentary record ultimately shows that political desperation led to an attempt to keep one foot in ADC and another in PDP, the appropriate response should not be political persecution. It should simply be the enforcement of the law.
