The All Progressives Congress senatorial primaries in Delta State have produced one of the sharpest internal shocks of the season, with incumbent Senator Ede Dafinone not only retaining the Delta Central ticket but doing so by a landslide that left former Deputy Senate President Ovie Omo-Agege with little room to contest the numbers.
Official results announced by the APC National Assembly Primary Committee put Dafinone on 116,252 votes against Omo-Agege’s 3,643, with party officials describing the exercise as peaceful, direct and widely participatory across the eight local government areas of the district.
That margin is politically devastating because it turns the primary into more than a routine ticket fight. It suggests a decisive collapse of Omo-Agege’s in-house leverage inside Delta Central, especially after he had repositioned himself from the governorship race back into senatorial politics.
Leadership’s report noted that Omo-Agege had earlier stepped aside in 2023 to contest the Delta governorship and lost, which makes this latest defeat look less like a single-day upset and more like a deeper vote of confidence against a once-dominant power bloc.
In practical terms, the numbers show that Dafinone was not merely preferred. He was overwhelmingly endorsed.
Dafinone himself tried to lower the temperature after the declaration, saying the process was “transparent, open, free, and fair” and urging his rival to help unify the party for the next battle.
His exact appeal to Omo-Agege was that both men should “join forces” so the APC could work together for “victory in 2027”. That line is important because it signals that the senator knows the win is only half the fight.
In Delta Central, the real test will be whether the defeated camp accepts the verdict or keeps the party in a prolonged legitimacy quarrel.
The counter-narrative, however, was immediate and telling. PUNCH reported that Omo-Agege declared himself the winner shortly after the exercise, insisting that collated results from all 85 wards across the district showed he had won “decisively”.
Premium Times later noted the same contradiction, saying Omo-Agege announced himself the winner even after the APC had declared Dafinone.
That dual-claim pattern points to a familiar APC primary problem in Nigeria: when the numbers do not settle the contest, political authority becomes the next battlefield.
Across the wider Delta APC picture, the Delta North result was equally emphatic. Former governor Ifeanyi Okowa took the ticket with 113,309 votes against incumbent Senator Ned Nwoko’s 2,612, while Mariam Ali scored 40.
The scale of that result, coming from a former governor who has already moved back into the APC contest space, tells a broader story of party realignment in Delta State.
It suggests that the APC’s senatorial primaries were not just selecting candidates. They were also reordering loyalties and recalibrating the balance of power ahead of 2027.
Delta South, which had initially been reported as still being collated, has now also gone the APC incumbent’s way. The Nation reported that Senator Joel-Onowakpo Thomas won the ticket with 87,805 votes against Michael Diden’s 30,794, while Tribune said he carried seven of the eight local government areas declared.
The senator thanked President Bola Tinubu, Governor Sheriff Oborevwori and Speaker Emomotimi Guwor, and said, “The way the people voted shows they have a lot of confidence in me.”
That makes the Delta APC outcome effectively a clean sweep by incumbents and former office holders who have managed to dominate their respective districts.
Collectively considered, the results show a party trying to reassemble itself around electoral muscle rather than old hierarchy.
Dafinone’s victory over a heavyweight like Omo-Agege is especially significant because it came with a margin so large that it can hardly be explained away as technical error or narrow factional drift.
The APC may now enter the 2027 cycle with stronger candidate clarity in Delta, but it also inherits a fresh internal challenge: how to turn bruised rivals into campaign assets rather than opposition from within.
The next phase will not be about who won the primaries. It will be about whether the losers accept the verdict and whether the party can convert these numbers into unity.
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