The APC Didn’t Just Win the Election; They Bought the Airwaves

If you were watching TV in early 2023 and felt like you couldn’t escape the blue flags of the APC, you weren’t imagining things. You were just doing the math.

New data from media monitors reveals exactly how lopsided the “airwave war” was in the lead-up to the election. Between January 17 and March 16, the APC recorded a whopping 1,143 political ads across the media platforms being watched.

Let me put that number in perspective for you.

The Labour Party, which was drawing massive crowds at every rally and dominating conversations on WhatsApp and Twitter, only managed 90 paid ads. Do the division yourself: The APC ran nearly 13 ads for every single ad run by the Labour Party.

This isn’t just a statistic; this is the story of two different campaigns colliding.

On one side, you had the Peter Obi “Obidient” movement—a grassroots, social media-fueled wave that felt unstoppable. But on the other side, you had the ruling party’s machinery, and that machinery was pumping money directly into the nation’s television sets.

The numbers prove that while the youth were online, the APC was on air. Specifically, on TVC, they occupied a staggering 93% of all political advertising slots. That means if you watched TVC during that period, the chances of seeing any other party’s message were almost zero. It was the APC channel.

Now, what does this mean for the average Nigerian?

It means that visibility is expensive. It means that the party with the largest purse doesn’t just get to talk more; they get to control the narrative. They get to define the agenda before the news even starts. While the PDP put up a respectable fight with 899 ads, and the NNPP made their presence known with 171, the sheer volume of the APC created a sense of inevitability. It created a feeling that they were everywhere.

Some might argue this is just smart politics. And they’d be right. But it also raises an uncomfortable question for the rest of us: In a country where the cost of living is soaring, how did one party afford to drown out every other voice by a factor of 13?

The 2023 election wasn’t just decided at the ballot box. If these numbers are anything to go by, it was decided long before—in the bank accounts and the TV studios where the APC refused to let you forget their name.