APC’s ₦200m Forms: Is Democracy Now a Rich Man’s Club?

Chidera was twenty-nine when he first told his mother he wanted to run for the House of Representatives. She laughed, not because the dream was foolish, but because she already knew what it would cost. That was 2019. Today in 2026, the All Progressives Congress has confirmed what she already suspected. A seat at the table now carries a price tag of seventy million naira just to express interest. Chidera does not have seventy million naira. Neither does most of Nigeria.

The APC’s announcement of its nomination and expression of interest form fees ahead of the 2026 general elections has not merely sparked debate. It has ripped open a wound that Nigerian democracy has been quietly nursing for years — the slow, deliberate pricing out of ordinary citizens from the very process meant to serve them.

The figures are staggering by any honest measure. Presidential aspirants must pay two hundred million naira. Governorship hopefuls are expected to produce one hundred and fifty million. Senate seats require a hundred million. The House of Representatives demands seventy million. And even the State House of Assembly, the level of government closest to the grassroots, is pegged at twenty million naira.

To put those numbers in unforgiving context, Nigeria’s minimum wage remains at seventy thousand naira per month in 2026. A state assembly aspirant would need to save every single kobo of that wage without touching a naira for food, rent, transportation, school fees, or anything else for nearly twenty-four years before they could afford to simply collect a form. Not to win. Not to campaign. Just to declare interest.

So the question is not subtle, and it deserves to be asked plainly. What kind of democracy is this?

A Party That Has Been Here Before — And Keeps Going Further

What makes this moment particularly disturbing is that it did not arrive without warning. Nigeria has watched this trajectory build across election cycles with the consistency of a policy, not an accident.

From 2015 to the 2023 general elections, the cost of the APC’s presidential nomination forms went up by over 300 percent, while the governorship form increased by more than 800 percent, the senate form by 506 percent, and the House of Representatives form by 354 percent. Those were already jaw-dropping figures. Now, with the 2026 fee structure, the party has doubled the presidential form from ₦100 million to ₦200 million. The State Assembly form has gone from ₦2 million in 2023 to ₦20 million in 2026, a tenfold leap in the space of a single election cycle.

It is worth recalling that even within the APC’s own history, this escalation once drew protest from inside its own tent. When Muhammadu Buhari contested in 2014, the presidential form cost N27 million, and he expressed concerns about such an enormous amount, stating “it’s a pity I couldn’t influence this amount to be put down… I felt heavily sorry for myself… N27 million is a big sum.” By 2019 under his own watch, the same form had risen to N45 million. By 2023, it had doubled to N100 million. Today it stands at N200 million. The man who once called twenty-seven million naira a burden presided over a system that made it look like pocket change.

The ruling party has fixed fees higher than what aspirants would earn as their legitimate salaries and allowances throughout the entire four-year term in the offices they are gunning for. The annual basic salary of the Nigerian President is ₦30,000,000, bringing total annual remuneration including allowances to approximately ₦78,000,000. That means a presidential aspirant in 2026 must pay a form fee that exceeds their total official earnings for more than two and a half years in the very office they are seeking. No Nigerian public official earns close to N100 million as legitimate income in eight years. At two hundred million, the arithmetic becomes even more merciless.

There is also a legal dimension to this that has received far too little attention. INEC’s Regulation 2 on the conduct of political party primaries explicitly states that political parties must not create rules or impose conditions or set high expression of interest or nomination fees that could exclude aspirants on the basis of sex, religion, ethnicity, circumstance of birth, or wealth. The regulation was designed precisely to prevent the commercialisation of party access. Experts say the implication is that while parties can raise funds through the sale of nomination forms, it should not preclude a majority of the people from taking part in running for elective positions. Yet cycle after cycle, INEC has watched the fees climb and has done virtually nothing to enforce its own rules. The loophole is not accidental. It is a convenience.

The Youth Question Nobody in the APC Is Answering

Nigerian politicians are generous with rhetoric about young people. The speeches are consistent and often lyrical. Young people are the leaders of tomorrow. Young people must be empowered. Give youth a chance. These sentences have appeared in so many party manifestos and presidential addresses that they have long since lost meaning. They have become decoration, draped over policies that actively shut the young out of participation.

Nigeria’s INEC chairman declared ahead of the 2023 elections that young people between the ages of 18 and 34 made up 39.5 percent of the country’s 93.4 million registered voters. The 2023 elections indeed saw young Nigerians show up in remarkable ways, driving the Labour Party surge, defending their votes at polling units through the night, and launching parallel collation efforts to verify results. They made their presence felt as voters. But who was on the ballot they were voting on?

In 2015, only three out of 360 members in the House of Representatives were youth between the ages of 18 and 35, representing just 0.3 percent of elected legislators. The Not Too Young to Run Act, passed in 2018 after years of tireless campaigning by civil society groups, lowered constitutional age requirements for office. It was celebrated as a breakthrough. But the numbers that followed told a sobering story.

Despite the movement that reduced the minimum age for vying for office, youth candidacy in the 2023 elections actually declined to 28.8 percent from 2019’s 34 percent. Young people between ages 25 and 35 won just 14 out of 360 seats in the House of Representatives, and 92 out of 993 constituency seats in state legislative houses. When youth is defined as those between 18 and 29, youth representation across all levels and tiers of governance in Nigeria stands at roughly 1 percent.

Youth candidacy data analysis from 2015 to 2023 has swung forward in 2019 and then backward in 2023, and researchers attribute this directly to the excessive cost of nomination forms, highly commercialised party primaries, and the substitution of candidates by party machinery.

The APC has offered a concession it calls inclusive. Youth aspirants between 25 and 40 years old are entitled to a 50 percent discount on nomination fees. But even by that measure, a young Nigerian seeking a State House of Assembly seat pays ten million naira. For the House of Representatives, that discounted price is thirty-five million naira. For the Senate, fifty million. For a governorship, seventy-five million. These are the discounted rates that the party presents as its gesture of youth inclusion. One cannot help but ask what they consider exclusion.

Corruption as a Precondition, Not a Consequence

This is the conversation that makes political figures deeply uncomfortable. So it must be had directly.

Where does the money come from?

A seventy-million-naira form is not purchased with a salary. Not a teacher’s salary, not a civil servant’s income, not a junior lecturer’s earnings, not even most senior professionals’ annual turnover. Nigeria’s documented history of what happens when politicians cannot finance themselves from honest means is instructive, and it carries a specific name. Godfatherism.

Because violence and corruption make political competition a very expensive endeavour in Nigeria, many politicians are far more accountable to powerful and violent political godfathers who sponsor them than they are to their constituents. This is not an abstract theoretical concern. It has played out in documented, catastrophic real-world incidents across Nigeria’s fourth republic.

On June 10th, 2003, the Nigerian godfather-godfather relationship brought Nigerian democracy to a standstill when Chris Uba, a self-described godfather, used miscreants and Nigerian police to kidnap his godson, Chris Ngige, the elected governor of Anambra State, because Ngige refused to fulfil obligations to his political sponsor. In Oyo State, in January 2007, a group of thugs linked to a powerful godfather figure attacked and nearly killed former Senator Lekan Balogun on the steps of the Oyo State House of Assembly. These are not folklore. They are court records and documented Human Rights Watch findings.

Academic research has consistently found that godfatherism undermines democratic governance in Nigeria by eroding meritocracy, weakening institutional independence, fostering political instability, and perpetuating corruption and underdevelopment, ultimately prioritising personal interests over public welfare.

Many godfathers in modern Nigerian politics operate in a manner that involves requesting the right to appoint commissioners, permanent secretaries, and board chairmen, with those officials in turn making equal monthly payments to their godfathers, just as their principal godsons do. The patron-client relationship tends to encourage political corruption because most patrons regard the sponsorship of their clients as a business venture. When the entry ticket to seek a legislative seat costs seventy million naira, the business logic of that venture becomes inescapable.

Studies have found that the APC and PDP deliberately drive up the cost of nomination to displace poor and non-rich competitors, creating a system where wealthy and prominent politicians compete to buy delegates, monetising the entire primary process. The former Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi, found it absurd that a poverty-stricken country like Nigeria would fix a presidential contest form at N100 million for a party ticket. In 2026, that figure has doubled.

In 2006, Nuhu Ribadu, the then-head of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, estimated that Nigeria had lost approximately $380 billion to corruption between independence in 1960 and the end of military rule in 1999. That figure has only grown in the decades since. Nigeria is not struggling with corruption because of bad luck or cultural inevitability. It is struggling because the financial architecture of its political system makes corruption a condition of entry, not a deviation from it.

When the APC sets a presidential form at two hundred million naira, it is not merely setting a price. It is selecting a class of aspirant. It is choosing people whose acquisition of that kind of wealth will almost always be tied to networks of obligation that follow them into office. When money shapes politics, it assaults the democratic right of citizens to contest for public office, and where it determines who qualifies to participate, the implication is the evolution of a state that exists to serve wealthy elites at the detriment of popular participation.

What the Numbers Mean for a Nation in Crisis

The timing of the APC’s 2026 fee structure deserves its own moment of honest reckoning, because it does not exist in a vacuum. It has arrived at a specific point in Nigeria’s economic life, and the contrast is brutal.

Between 2019 and 2023, average consumption in Nigeria fell by 6.7 percent, especially in urban areas, while poverty rose from 40 percent, representing 81 million people, to a projected 61 percent, representing 139 million people, by 2025, with three-quarters of that increase occurring before 2023. More than 80 percent of people in the North-East live below the poverty line, compared with about 30 percent in the South, while the wider northern region records poverty rates above 70 percent.

Nigeria’s minimum wage of ₦70,000 per month is equivalent to approximately $47 USD, and with headline inflation staying elevated, ₦70,000 barely covers a week’s worth of living in even some rural communities.

This is the country in which the APC governs. This is the electorate whose mandate it claims. And these are the people it has decided should be represented in parliament by individuals who can produce between twenty million and two hundred million naira in nomination fees alone, before a single campaign poster has been printed.

The current huge nomination fee structure discriminates between party members and party owners. That sentence deserves to be read slowly. Nigeria’s largest ruling party has internally divided itself not by ideology, not by geography, not by policy vision, but by wealth. The party member is the one who carries a membership card and attends ward meetings. The party owner is the one who can afford the form. And only the party owner gets to run.

As long as money, not competence, character, or popular appeal, operates as a fundamental variable in leadership recruitment of political parties, voters will refrain from voting because commercialised political processes are more likely to produce unpopular, unaccountable, and incompetent candidates. Voter apathy in Nigeria is not mysterious. It is a rational response to a system that has consistently demonstrated its preference for wealth over merit.

Nigeria’s young people deserve a better answer than a ₦70 million form. They deserve a democracy that does not ask them to become something other than honest before they can even apply. They deserve a party system that treats youth inclusion as more than a speech at a convention hall. And they deserve leaders bold enough to admit that when a nomination form costs more than the office pays, the party is not screening for seriousness. It is screening for a very specific kind of money, with all the compromises that money carries.

That is not democracy. That is an auction. And Nigeria’s future cannot afford to keep paying the price.