Just 48 hours after veteran journalist, Reuben Abati suggested the establishment of a “Tinubu school of politics”, publicly available data from Nigeria’s electoral umpire has delivered a stinging reality check to the country’s newest opposition coalition.

On Monday, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) released party membership figures submitted by all registered political parties.

The All Progressives Congress (APC) reported 12,897,723 verified members. In distant second place, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) submitted 2,487,000 members, followed by the African Democratic Congress (ADC) with 1,655,890 members and the Labour Party (LP) with 1,300,390 members.

The National Democratic Congress (NDC), the newly formed coalition platform that recently welcomed Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso, submitted a total of 700,789 members — barely above five percent of the APC’s membership strength.

The figures directly contradict claims made just weeks ago by NDC officials. On May 4, the party announced that its membership registration website had crashed following an “unprecedented surge” and that “more than 10 million Nigerians” had registered within 24 hours of Obi and Kwankwaso joining the platform.

Dr. Adefolaseye Adebayo, the South-West coordinator of the Obi-Kwankwaso Movement, made the assertion during an appearance on Arise Television, insisting that the surge reflected Obi’s national appeal across the six geopolitical zones. Yet no independent verification from INEC or any credible authority has supported the claim, and the official register now shows a figure dramatically at odds with the narrative.

The discrepancy matters because INEC’s certified membership data is the gold standard for party strength ahead of the 2027 general elections. The APC chairman, Professor Nentawe Yilwatda, speaking on ARISE News on Monday, emphasised that the ruling party’s register is verified through the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) — a level of validation he said no other party has achieved. “APC is the only political party that sources data from NIMC, which means that you cannot come unverified,” Yilwatda said, adding that the combined membership of all opposition parties still falls short of the APC’s 12.9 million.

Political commentators have seized on the data to project the 2027 electoral landscape. Reuben Abati, speaking on Arise Television’s Morning Show, suggested that President Bola Tinubu’s landslide victory in the APC presidential primary — where he secured 10,999,162 votes against a sole challenger — already functions as a “demonstration effect” for the opposition. “If his party can give him 11 million votes then the opposition will need to get more than that,” Abati said.

He pointed to the practical arithmetic: even if Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi combined their 2023 vote totals — 6,984,520 and 6,101,533 respectively — they would still fall short of Tinubu’s primary vote alone, not counting the wider voting demography of non-party members who consistently support the incumbent.

For the NDC, the gap between the 10‑million narrative and the 700,789 official figure raises questions about internal transparency and organisational capacity. The party has yet to respond to the INEC data, but political analysts note that such wide discrepancies between public claims and verified records rarely go unnoticed by the electorate.

As one observer put it, claiming 10 million registrations without producing evidence — while the official register tells a different story — looks less like political momentum and more like political hyperbole.

The INEC register is now a matter of public record. The numbers are clear: APC stands at 12.9 million members, and the NDC, for all its ambitious talk, lags far behind.