Asaba · Friday 11 September 2026
Ifeanyi Okowa, the PDP's vice-presidential candidate in 2023, has said he knew that he and Atiku Abubakar would lose the presidential election before the results were announced. He was speaking at an event in Delta State. Eleven outlets carried it.
Why this is unusual
Nigerian politicians who lose elections generally maintain, often for years, that they won. A candidate on a major ticket saying plainly that he expected defeat is a departure from a script that has survived every cycle since 1999.
The week it lands in
| Figure | Position on 2023 |
|---|---|
| Peter Obi | Says he won, and has proof |
| Ifeanyi Okowa | Says he knew his ticket had lost |
| The courts | Dismissed the petitions |
Two senior figures from the same election, in the same week, describing different realities.
What Okowa is really describing
A campaign that could read its own position. Parties run internal polling and have ward-level agents reporting what they see, and that information usually reaches the candidate well before a result. The public posture of certain victory is maintained anyway, because conceding anything before a result is treated as surrender.
Every losing Nigerian campaign knows roughly what is coming. The performance of confidence is for the agents, the donors and the base, not for the candidate.
Why the PDP ticket was in trouble
The opposition vote split three ways in 2023, with Obi taking a substantial share of the younger and southern vote the PDP had counted on, and the party fighting a public internal row over zoning at the same time. None of that was secret at the time and all of it was visible to the people running the campaign.
The use of saying it now
It is a warning aimed at 2027, whether or not Okowa intends it as one. The same arithmetic is forming again: an opposition split across platforms, with Atiku on one and Obi on another, and a combined 2023 opposition vote that was larger than the winning total only when added together.
Reporting: Daily Post, Arise News and BarristerNG.
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