A lot of politicians are still misreading Nigeria. That’s especially true of the new entrants to the country’s political circus, the ones who mistake money for momentum and assume that deep pockets can buy power, influence, and the right to decide who gets what, when, and how. Nigerian politics doesn’t work like that. Nowhere does it expose that miscalculation faster than in the South East.

The South East is one of Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones, but it has never behaved like the others when it comes to party loyalty. Here, the politics of power, patronage, and big-man endorsements don’t automatically translate into votes. The region has shown, election after election, that the average voter is not easily swayed by a press conference announcing a defection or by a candidate’s bank balance. There’s a deeper calculus at play, one tied to history, identity, trust, and a long memory of who stood where when it mattered.

That’s why the current wave of defections into the All Progressives Congress across the South East tells us more about elite bargaining than about grassroots realignment. Yes, you can have a senator, a House of Representatives member, and a governor cross over from the PDP or Labour Party to the APC within a week. The headlines will look impressive. The Abuja optics will be perfect. But on the ground in Enugu, Imo, Anambra, Abia, and Ebonyi, the average voter still doesn’t see APC as their party of choice.

This is not an argument about the APC as a government. It’s about the APC as a political brand in the South East. And right now, that brand carries a perception problem that no single defection can erase. Until the party confronts that gap between elite alignment and voter sentiment, every high-profile switch will look like what it often is: an elite deal, negotiated in hotel lobbies and announced on television, with little connection to ward-level realities.

We saw this gap play out again in the recent APC primaries across the five South Eastern states. The process was messy, as primaries often are. But one pattern was clear. Several high-profile aspirants, including some celebrities and businessmen who had built national visibility outside politics, failed to secure tickets. The exceptions were those who came in through cross-carpeting from other parties, bringing with them existing structures and relationships. Money alone didn’t deliver victory. Name recognition alone didn’t either.

That should be a signal. Issue-based politicking remains sacrosanct in this zone. Voters here tend to ask: What have you done? What do you stand for? Who have you stood with when it was unpopular? In a region that has felt politically marginalized for decades, these questions carry weight. People are skeptical of late converts and sudden patriots. They want to see consistency, local investment, and a track record of showing up before the election season.

The political class that ignores this does so at its own peril. Some assume their purses will do the heavy lifting, that the logic of “give them something now, and they’ll vote later” still holds. That assumption is misleading, and it’s capable of producing fatal losses. The South East electorate has punished that approach before. They’ll do it again.

It’s worth stating plainly: the APC’s strength is not rooted in the South East zone. To change that would require extraordinary, sustained work. Not a six-month media blitz before an election, but years of consistent engagement, policy responsiveness, and visible delivery. It would mean building structures from the ward up, not just importing them from the top down. It would mean listening to what the region prioritizes, whether that’s infrastructure, security, industrial policy, or fair representation in federal appointments.

That kind of work doesn’t happen on election-year timelines. It happens in the quiet years between elections, when there are no cameras and no microphones. And it has to be future-focused, not an immediate expectation. Anyone promising to “deliver the South East” to the APC in the next senatorial or House election is selling a fantasy. It’s a tall order, and it would take more than a few defections to make it real.

The historical context matters here. The South East’s relationship with national politics has been shaped by the civil war, by the marginalization that followed, and by a long period of opposition politics. The region found a political home in the PDP for over a decade, and more recently, a significant portion of its energy flowed into the Labour Party’s wave in 2023. Those alignments weren’t random. They reflected a search for platforms that felt responsive to the region’s concerns.

When a party wants to break into that space, it can’t do it by assuming that structure equals loyalty. Structures can be rented. Loyalty has to be earned. And in the South East, it’s earned through presence, not just promises. It’s earned when a party’s representatives show up for town halls, when federal projects in the zone are completed on time and to standard, when local businesses feel that the federal government sees them as partners, not afterthoughts.

There’s also the question of candidate quality and local legitimacy. The recent primaries showed that voters, even within the APC, are willing to reject candidates they perceive as parachutists. Celebrities who are popular on Instagram but absent from local party meetings found that popularity didn’t convert into delegate votes. That’s a good thing for internal democracy. It suggests that even within a party that is still building its base in the region, there’s a demand for authenticity and grassroots connection.

The APC’s national leadership seems to understand this on some level. The party has made overtures to the South East through appointments and infrastructure commitments. But overtures are not the same as integration. Integration means that South Eastern members of the APC have real influence in shaping party policy, not just in being used as proof of national spread. It means that the party’s messaging in the zone doesn’t feel like an afterthought translated from Abuja talking points. It means building a South Eastern APC identity, not expecting the zone to adopt a Northern or South Western template.

There’s a lesson here for the politicians making the switch. Defecting to a ruling party can offer immediate advantages: access, funding, and a better shot at party machinery in the next election. But if the move is purely transactional, voters see through it. And in the South East, they punish it. The region respects political calculation, but it respects conviction more. If you’re going to switch parties, you need to bring the people with you, and you bring the people with you by showing them why the new platform serves their interests better than the old one.

What would it take for the APC to become competitive in the South East in a way that feels organic? First, patience. You don’t build trust in two years. Second, policy focus. The party needs to articulate a clear agenda for the zone that goes beyond slogans. What’s the plan for Aba’s manufacturing clusters? For Onitsha’s trade corridor? For agriculture in Ebonyi and Enugu? For youth unemployment across the region? Third, candidate selection. The party needs to back candidates with local roots, credibility, and a history of service, not just those with the biggest war chests.

Fourth, communication. The APC’s narrative in the South East often feels defensive. It spends too much time explaining why the region should trust it, and not enough time showing what it has done. Politics is a business of receipts. If the receipts are there, the conversation changes. If they’re not, no amount of defections will substitute.

The reality is stark. The South East is not APC territory yet. Defections alone won’t make it so. They might win a seat or two in the short term, and they might help the party manage its national spread optics. But they won’t shift the underlying voter alignment. That shift requires work that is slower, less glamorous, and harder to measure in the news cycle.

So to anyone thinking they will deliver the region to the party in the next round of senatorial or House elections, it’s worth a rethink. Delivering a zone isn’t like delivering a ward through a structure you control. A zone has a mind of its own, shaped by years of experience, by conversations in markets and churches, by what people see and what they don’t see from their government.

The South East will engage. It will vote. It will reward candidates who prove themselves. But it won’t be rushed, and it won’t be bought. Until the APC understands that, it will keep mistaking elite movement for grassroots momentum. And it will keep losing fatally in its quest for political power in a region that demands more than that.

If the party wants to change the story, it knows what to do. Start local. Stay local. Deliver locally. Everything else is noise.

Emeka Monye Is A Journalist