An Unvoted Council of Overlords: A Caution for GAC

By Usman Adewale

Let us begin with the most important fact in this entire debate about who governs Lagos after 2027: the Governance Advisory Council, otherwise known as the GAC, does not exist in the constitution of the All Progressives Congress. Not in a footnote. Not in a clause. Not in a schedule. Nowhere.

Search the APC constitution from cover to cover. You will find provisions for the National Executive Committee, the State Executive Committee, the Board of Trustees, the State Working Committee, the Ward Executive Committee, every legitimate organ of party governance, each with defined composition, defined powers, and democratic accountability. What you will not find, anywhere in that document, is an entity called the Governance Advisory Council with the power to select governorship candidates, override elected legislators, determine who leads the House of Assembly, or anoint the next governor of a state of 24 million people.

Although their roles might not be recognised in the constitution, the APC Lagos spokesperson maintained that it is very important for the success of APC in the state.

That sentence deserves to be read twice, slowly. The party’s own spokesman is conceding that the GAC has no constitutional basis, and then asking everyone to accept it anyway because it is “very important.” Important to whom? Not to the voters of Lagos. Not to the card-carrying APC members whose votes are supposed to determine candidates.

Important only to the small circle of men who constitute the GAC and who have, for over two decades, mistaken their access to one powerful man for a permanent license to govern by proxy.

This is the arrangement that now threatens to impose Dr. Kadri Obafemi Hamzat on Lagos as its next governor, not through a free, fair, and credible primary, but through the familiar machinery of the BabaSope consensus. And it must be resisted.

A BODY BORN OF ONE MAN’S WILL

The GAC was not established by any democratic process. It was not voted into existence by APC members. It was not appointed by any legitimate party organ. GAC was founded in 1999 by Tinubu, then-governor of Lagos State, and has since functioned as a platform through which Tinubu controls the party structure in the state.

It is, in plain terms, a personal instrument of political control, created by one man, sustained by his authority, and legitimised by nothing other than the fear of those who depend on his goodwill.

The GAC got public attention in 2019, when the group stood against Ambode, blocking his second-term ticket on the platform of the APC. Despite entreaties, meetings, and even intervention by then-President Muhammadu Buhari to secure Ambode’s return ticket, the GAC allegedly asked him to test his popularity in a primary contest where he was the underdog, despite being a sitting governor.

A sitting governor, with a demonstrable performance record, was humiliated and sent to contest a primary that had already been decided. This is the body that now prepares to repeat the exercise, this time not removing a governor, but installing one.

Civil rights group CRRAN submitted that GAC as it stands is an aberration to constitutional democracy in Lagos, that the situation whereby a handful of people tend to hijack the powers of elected representatives of the people has no place under the Nigerian Constitution and under the laws of the land.

This is not the language of opposition mischief. This is the language of constitutional reality. The GAC is, legally and democratically speaking, a private club exercising public power it was never given.

THE DYNASTY PROBLEM

Look carefully at who sits in the GAC and what they have accumulated. The chairman of the body reportedly has his son as Council Chairman in Lagos Island, while another member is said to be pushing for his son to be Council Chairman in Ajeromi-Ifelodun, in spite of having one already at the Lagos House of Assembly.

These are the men who will decide who governs Lagos. Men who have already positioned their children in public office through the same machinery they now propose to use for the governorship.

This is not an advisory council.

This is a dynasty management committee. And the candidate they are rallying behind, Hamzat, is himself a product of this dynastic logic.

Hamzat boasts of strong family ties to the GAC, as his father was a former GAC leader.

The son of a former GAC leader, being endorsed by the current GAC, through a process controlled by the GAC, for the governorship of a state whose voters were never consulted at any stage. The circularity is breathtaking. The arrogance is worse.

One does not need to be a constitutional lawyer to recognise that what is being described here is not democracy. It is oligarchy wearing democracy’s clothing. It is disheartening that democracy in Lagos State, the commercial capital of Nigeria, has been upturned and replaced with oligarchy.

The actions of these oligarchs in Lagos constitute a threat to the Constitution and democracy in Nigeria.

THE GAC IS ALREADY IN CRISIS, AND IT KNOWS IT

What the GAC’s cheerleaders will not tell you is that the body is itself fractured, discredited, and increasingly irrelevant to its own membership.

The divergent views among GAC members have stemmed from two groups within the council, the Justice Forum and the Mandate Movement, whose members are now in open conflict with each other.

This is not a united council of wise elders dispensing wisdom. This is a divided faction fighting internal wars over Speaker positions, local government chairmanships, and now the governorship, all while presenting a face of serene consensus to the outside world.

Critics say the GAC has outlived its usefulness and has become a burden on Tinubu and the state government, hence the calls from certain quarters for its abolition.

These are not the words of outsiders or enemies of the Lagos project.

They are the words of insiders who have watched this body degenerate from a stabilising force into a self-serving machine whose primary output is the protection of its own members’ interests and those of their children.

A body that cannot manage its own internal democracy has no moral authority to manage Lagos’.

THE VOTERS ARE NOT WITHOUT CHOICES

The GAC proceeds on a dangerous assumption: that Lagos voters are captive.

That the APC ticket, however obtained, however imposed, will automatically convert to electoral victory because Lagos has always delivered for the party. They point to the party’s dominance and assume that what the GAC endorses, the electorate will ratify.

2023 destroyed that assumption. And the GAC has not recovered from the shock.

President Tinubu, the very founder and patron of the GAC, the man whose authority legitimises the entire structure, lost his home state in the presidential election. The party’s own spin doctors blamed the Igbo community in Lagos. But the polling unit data from Yoruba-majority APC strongholds in Surulere, Ikeja, and Epe told a different, more damning story: aggrieved APC members, tired of being managed rather than represented, voted elsewhere or stayed home in sufficient numbers to swing results.

The panic that followed, the emergency cash releases, the frantic late media campaign to rescue Sanwo-Olu’s governorship bid, was not the behaviour of a party confident in its mandate. It was the behaviour of a party that had finally glimpsed what organised internal discontent looks like at scale.

The message from 2023 was clear. The GAC ignored it. They should not make the same mistake twice.

Lagos voters, particularly the millions of Christian voters who have watched the religious arithmetic of succession play out to their structural disadvantage, the Ambode loyalists who remember what a genuine performance looks like, the young voters who are no longer willing to genuflect before self-appointed elders, and the authentic Lagos indigenes offended by the imposition of a candidate whose own state of origin is a matter of active dispute, these voters are organised, aware, and angry.

They have options. And in a Lagos where the opposition, whether Labour Party, PDP, or any credible vehicle of protest, needs only the APC’s own disenchanted base to become competitive, internal discontent is not an inconvenience. It is an existential threat.

WHAT THE GAC MUST DO, AND WHAT IT MUST NOT

The demand from this writer is simple, and it is addressed directly to the Governance Advisory Council, to its chairman Pa Tajudeen Olusi, and to every member who has thus far allowed the Hamzat coronation to proceed by WhatsApp and Twitter endorsement rather than by legitimate democratic process.

Step back.

Not from Lagos politics entirely, though that day is also coming. But step back from this specific act of imposition. Allow the APC primaries, already scheduled by INEC to hold between April 23 and May 30, 2026, to proceed as a genuine contest. Allow Akinwunmi Ambode, Hamzat, and any other qualified aspirant to present themselves to APC delegates in a free, fair, and transparent process.

Allow Lagos voters, through their party membership, to express a genuine preference.

If Hamzat is truly the people’s choice, a clean primary will prove it. If he can only emerge through a back-room arrangement, that is all the answer anyone needs.

The APC constitution recognises a Board of Trustees at the national level. It does not recognise the GAC.

Whatever advisory role this council may have historically claimed, it has no constitutional authority to select candidates.

Selecting candidates is the exclusive prerogative of party members through a primary election, as prescribed by the Electoral Act, as required by INEC, and as demanded by the democratic contract the APC signed when it registered as a political party.

The GAC may advise. It may not decide. That line has been crossed repeatedly, and Lagos has paid the price each time in poisoned internal politics, suppressed talent, and the slow erosion of genuine party democracy.

A FINAL WARNING

There is a species of political arrogance that confuses long tenure with legitimacy. The GAC has been operating for over two decades, and in that time it has accumulated the habits of unaccountable power: the assumption that its preferences are final, that its endorsements are binding, that its consensus is the people’s will.

It is none of these things. It never was. It was always, at its core, the political management tool of one man, a tool that man used with considerable skill when he was Lagos governor. But that man is now Nigeria’s president. The Lagos governorship is no longer his primary instrument of influence. And a GAC that continues to operate as though it is 2007, as though Tinubu is still governor, as though the political machine that served him then still serves Lagos now, is a body that has confused its own legend with its present relevance.

A PDP chieftain described the GAC plainly: there is nothing democratic about it. It is a smokescreen, because it is obvious the APC in Lagos is controlled by a small group whose decisions are imposed on the majority.

When even your opponents can describe your institution more accurately than your own members will, it is time to take stock.

The GAC should not push its luck in 2027. Lagos is watching. Lagos is counting. And Lagos, as 2023 demonstrated in ways that should still keep party strategists awake at night, is more than capable of delivering a verdict that no amount of last-minute cash can reverse.

Let the people choose. That is not a radical demand. It is the minimum requirement of democracy.

And if the GAC cannot meet that minimum, then perhaps the critics calling for its abolition are not as extreme as the council’s members would like to believe.

Usman Adewale is a political analyst based in Ikorodu, Lagos.