The Regrets of Sacrificing Foundational Loyalists for Ogbara’s ‘Scorched-Earth’ Experimen

By prioritizing a late-entrant defector—referred to as a decampee—over core, foundational loyalists who built the party from scratch, leadership has triggered an unprecedented wave of internal resistance, anti-party sentiments, and structural division.

The political landscape across Kosofe, Ikosi-Isheri, and Agboyi-Ketu is facing its most severe internal crisis. What local political analysts are calling a "costly mistake" by the All Progressives Congress (APC) leadership has left deep, bleeding fractures in the party’s grassroots foundation.

Now, following a crushing primary defeat, that same decampee experiment threatens to pull down the entire local party structure

For years, the strength of the APC in the Kosofe Federal Constituency relied heavily on its baseline loyalists. These are the party faithful, community mobilisers, and grassroots organisers who weathered every political storm. They stayed committed through lean times, personal sacrifices, and challenging election cycles to keep the party's flag flying high.

However, in 2022, the political calculations shifted dramatically when the party apparatus cleared the path for a powerful decampee alignment, heavily shaking the local political hierarchy. Long-term loyalists argue that rewarding opportunistic defectors with high-stakes legislative influence and party machinery—while neglecting those who sustained the grassroots—is an act of political ingratitude.

The bitter fruits of this strategy have ripened during the June jhighly contentious APC primary election cycle. According to official declarations, local favorite and celebrated Agboyi-Ketu council Chairman Mayor Dele Oshinowo comprehensively won the primary election with 18,614 votes, while the incumbent, Hon. Kafilat Ogbara, plummeted to fourth place with just 5,450 votes.

Despite this decisive defeat, Ogbara’s camp has engaged in intense political grandstanding. Appearing on a TVC News Programme, Hon. Ogbara dismissed the official results as "political intrigues, rumours, and fabrications," aggressively claiming that the results were "written by someone else." She has consistently maintained that she will not concede defeat until the APC National Secretariat releases a final candidate list.

This post-election defiance has drawn fierce condemnation from local civil society coalitions, including the Centre for Human and Socio-economic Rights (CHSR), which publicly warned that her contradictory narratives threaten to overheat the local polity.

Rather than gracefully conceding, grassroots insiders report that Ogbara has allegedly adopted a deliberate, three-phased "destabilisation approach" to dismantle the local party structure:

• Public Discreditation: Utilizing media platforms to label certified results as fabrications, creating alternate realities for her remaining supporters.
• Structural Parallelism: Attempting to run a shadow party apparatus within Kosofe, effectively bypassing the recognized LGA chairmen and ward executives.
• The Victimhood Narrative: Presenting her defeat as a targeted conspiracy by local "godfathers," aiming to alienate women and minority blocs from the main party stream.

Local party stalwarts warn that this scorched-earth strategy is intended to render the Kosofe APC ungovernable, creating an artificial crisis to force an intervention or cancellation of the democratic outcome by the National Secretariat.

The most alarming development for APC elders is the strong indication of a clandestine exit plan. Whispers within Lagos political circles suggest that if the APC National Working Committee (NWC) ratifies Mayor Dele Oshinowo's victory, Ogbara is preparing to deploy a political Plan B.

Sources reveal that she is strongly considering leveraging her historical relationship with former APC National Secretary and political heavyweight, Iyiola Omisore, to secure an alternative platform. The two primary options currently on the table include:

1. The Accord Party Blueprint: Replicating a growing trend where disgruntled heavyweights utilize the Accord Party as a placeholder vehicle to contest general elections, banking on personal structure over party brand.
2. The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Alignment: Returning to a familiar landscape or forming an alliance with the main opposition party, the PDP, to build a formidable anti-APC coalition in Kosofe.

To foundational loyalists, this rumoured defection plan is entirely unsurprising. They point to her political history as a chronic decampee who has moved across party lines whenever personal ambitions are stalled.

As local stakeholders demand unconditional compliance with the primary outcomes, Kosofe APC faces a ticking clock. If Ogbara executes a late-hour defection to Accord or the PDP, it will transform the constituency into a high-stakes, three-way electoral battlefield that could permanently shatter the ruling party's dominance in Lagos. The lesson for Kosofe’s political godfathers remains painfully clear: a party that sacrifices its core loyalists for opportunistic defectors builds its house on sand.