The All Progressives Congress has declared it will take back Oyo State in 2027, with Senator Alli publicly staking the party's confidence on a return to Government House in Ibadan — a building the APC last occupied before Governor Seyi Makinde's decisive victory in 2019 and his even wider re-election margin in 2023.
Oyo State holds roughly 7.8 million registered voters, spread across 33 local government areas that stretch from the urban intensity of Ibadan — Nigeria's largest city by landmass — to the farming communities of Oke-Ogun and the trading corridors of Ogbomosho and Saki. Any party that wants to govern the state must win convincingly across all three blocs, and Makinde's PDP demonstrated in 2023 that it currently commands all of them.
Makinde secured his second term in March 2023 with a margin that exceeded 300,000 votes, defeating the APC's Teslim Folarin in a contest the opposition expected to be far closer. That outcome left Oyo as one of the most secure PDP governorships in the south-west, a region the APC had long treated as its natural stronghold.
The APC's confidence, at least on the surface, is not without political logic. The party's national leadership has been rebuilding its south-west structures since the 2023 losses, and a second-term governor constitutionally barred from running again in 2027 changes the arithmetic — removing Makinde's personal appeal from the ballot and forcing the PDP to find a candidate who can hold the coalition he assembled.
Senator Alli's declaration, relayed through the News Agency of Nigeria, carries the tone of a party signalling to its own rank and file as much as to the wider public — a message that defections, internal crises, and the bruising losses of the past two election cycles have not broken the party's appetite for Oyo.
Between now and 2027, the APC will need to resolve the candidate question, consolidate factional loyalties that have historically fractured at the primary stage, and persuade Oyo's large informal trading population and its significant rural farming communities — many of whom have drifted toward the PDP — that the party offers a credible alternative on food prices, road infrastructure, and basic services. The governorship primary alone, scheduled to fall inside an increasingly compressed pre-election window, will be the first real test of whether the confidence Senator Alli projects is organisational or merely aspirational.
