News

2027: Defections, reconciliation moves reshape Niger’s political landscape

Published

2 hours ago

July 31, 2026

Preport

With about six months to the 2027 general elections, Niger State’s political landscape is undergoing a rapid transformation as parties reposition, old alliances are tested and new ones begin to emerge.

What started as disagreements over the outcome of party primaries has evolved into defections, reconciliation efforts and intensified political consultations, setting the stage for what many observers believe could be one of the state’s most competitive governorship contests in recent years.

For the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, the task is to preserve its dominance and unite members after divisive party primaries.

Opposition parties, on the other hand, are seeking to convert the cracks within the ruling party into electoral gains, insisting that security, governance, public spending and economic realities have reshaped the political conversation ahead of the polls.

Amid the shifting alliances, the Nigeria Democratic Congress, NDC, is battling its own internal disputes over leadership and candidacies, while the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, says it remains firmly in contention despite growing attention on the APC and the African Democratic Congress, ADC.

As political actors intensify consultations and parties rebuild their structures, DAILY POST examines the events shaping the race, the competing narratives from the major political players and the issues that could influence voters when Niger people eventually head to the polls.

Fallout from APC Primaries

The current political realignments can be traced to the APC primaries held in May 2026, where candidates emerged for various elective positions ahead of next year’s elections.

Although party leaders hailed the exercise as successful, its outcome left some aspirants dissatisfied, with complaints over the emergence of candidates in some constituencies.

Some aggrieved members remained in the APC to seek reconciliation, but others began exploring political alternatives, setting the stage for one of the biggest waves of defections witnessed in the state in recent years.

Political observers say the fallout from the primaries has continued to influence political calculations, forcing both the ruling party and the opposition to review their strategies ahead of the election.

Defections Alter Political Calculations

Those calculations became more pronounced on Thursday, July 16, 2026, when the Niger Rescue Movement Political Family announced its decision to dump the APC for the ADC.

The political family, led by former Chief of Staff to former Governor Abubakar Sani Bello, Maikil Al-Amin Bmitosahi, defected alongside former commissioners, former local government chairmen, former councillors and other party loyalists.

The defectors cited dissatisfaction with developments in the APC led administration of Governor Bago following the primaries and declared their intention to work for political change ahead of the 2027 general elections.

Their decision immediately sparked debate across the state, with supporters and critics of the ruling party offering different interpretations of what it could mean for the governorship race.

Opposition parties described the defections as evidence that cracks were beginning to appear within the APC. The ruling party, on its part, dismissed the move as politically insignificant, insisting it remained united and focused.

Bago Moves to Reconcile Aggrieved Members

Days later, Governor Bago convened a special meeting with APC candidates and unsuccessful aspirants, a move seen as part of efforts to consolidate the party and address concerns arising from the primaries ahead of the 2027 elections.

The defections and post-primary discontent prompted the APC leadership to step up efforts to restore confidence within its ranks.

The meeting, held on Saturday, July 25, brought together Deputy Governor Yakubu Garba, APC North Central Zonal Vice Chairman Mu’azu Bawa Rijau, APC State Chairman Aminu Musa Bobi, candidates, aspirants and other party stakeholders.

According to the governor’s Chief Press Secretary, Bologi Ibrahim, the meeting was aimed at strengthening unity among party members and evolving strategies to ensure victory for all APC candidates in the 2027 general elections.

Addressing the gathering, Bago urged party members to remain committed to the APC, the Renewed Hope Agenda of President Bola Tinubu and his administration’s New Niger Agenda.

He stressed that loyalty and unity remained critical to the party’s success, urging members to place the collective interest of the APC above personal ambitions.

The meeting also provided an opportunity for candidates and aspirants to deliberate on issues arising from the primaries and offer suggestions on strengthening the party ahead of the elections.

The reconciliation meeting came days after Governor Bago made remarks that generated political reactions across the state.

‘I Have Their Files’

During a sympathy visit to Kagara following the communal violence in Rafi Local Government Area, the governor disclosed that he had records relating to the immediate past administration but had deliberately chosen not to investigate former Governor Abubakar Sani Bello.

According to him, although some people had urged him to probe his predecessor, he considered peace and stability more important than political vendetta.

Bago also criticised politicians who left the APC after the primaries, suggesting that some were driven by personal interests rather than the overall interest of the state.

He further warned against fake news and misinformation, directing security agencies to investigate individuals spreading information capable of causing public disorder.

Government Dismisses Claims of Political Rift

Amid the political speculations, the state government dismissed reports suggesting that influential stakeholders had withdrawn support for Governor Bago.

Speaking with DAILY POST, the governor’s Chief Press Secretary, Bologi Ibrahim, said there was no truth to claims that elder statesmen in the state were opposed to the governor’s re-election.

He said former military president Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida and former Head of State Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar remained supportive of the administration, adding that both leaders had continued to commend Governor Bago’s developmental efforts.

Bologi also dismissed claims that the governor was facing an internal rebellion within the APC, insisting that reconciliation efforts were already yielding results.

According to him, the meeting with candidates and aspirants demonstrated the party’s resolve to close ranks and approach the 2027 elections as a united family.

ADC Sees Opportunity

If the APC insists the post-primary crisis has been brought under control, the opposition believes the developments present an opportunity to reshape the state’s political landscape ahead of 2027.

The governorship candidate of the ADC, Dr. Mohammed Kpautagi Mohammed, accused the Bago administration of poor governance, lack of transparency and disregard for due process, urging Niger people to vote out the ruling APC in the next election.

Kpautagi promised that an ADC administration would prioritise security, healthcare, education, agriculture, infrastructure, local government autonomy and prudent management of public resources.

He also maintained that insecurity, economic hardship and what he described as poor governance had created the need for a change in leadership.

An ADC chieftain, Dr. Abdullahi Ishaq, said the party was not depending solely on the recent defections from the APC but had been quietly strengthening its structures across the state before the current political realignments.

According to him, the recent influx of politicians into the ADC would further boost the party’s grassroots mobilisation ahead of the election.

He argued that insecurity had remained the biggest challenge confronting many communities in Niger State, adding that governance should be measured not only by physical infrastructure but also by the protection of lives and livelihoods.

Ishaq also said issues of fiscal responsibility, public spending, humanitarian support for victims of insecurity and service delivery would feature prominently in the party’s campaign.

PDP Rejects Third Force Label

On its part, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has, however, dismissed suggestions that the governorship contest would be between only the APC and the ADC.

Speaking with DAILY POST, the party’s State Secretary, Hamidu A. A. Kadi Kuta said the PDP remained a strong political force and should not be excluded from any assessment of the 2027 race.

He expressed confidence that more political realignments would occur before the election, insisting that the PDP had the structure and capacity to challenge for power.

According to him, the party was concentrating on strengthening its organisation across the state and ensuring that all its candidates were properly uploaded to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) portal.

On Governor Bago’s performance, Kadi Kuta declined to give a direct assessment, saying it was for Niger people to compare the present administration with previous governments of PDP and decide who deserved their mandate.

NDC Battles Internal Crisis

Even as opposition parties attempt to capitalise on the APC’s internal challenges, the NDC is battling a crisis that has also raised questions about its preparedness for the election.

In an early July statement, a House of Representatives aspirant for Bida/Katcha/Gbako Federal Constituency, Mohammed Abubakar Katcha, called for the resignation of the party’s Niger State Chairman, Ahmed Inuwa.

Katcha alleged that the chairman had “mortgaged the party in Niger State to advance the interests of APC candidates,” warning that such actions could undermine the party’s chances in the 2027 elections.

He also accused the state leadership of compromising the party’s internal processes and appealed to the national leadership to intervene before the situation deteriorated further.

The uncertainty appears to have extended to the governorship ticket, with Alhaji Yahaya Muhammad Guregi and Idris Usman Makanta, popularly known as Shinkafan Nupe, both laying claim to being the party’s governorship candidate.

A source within the party, who requested anonymity, told DAILY POST that the lingering dispute had unsettled many members of the party.

“As it is, our party is not in order. We still have issues resulting from our primaries aside from the governorship candidate wahala. We feel there are forces out to destabilise our party,” the source said.

Checks by DAILY POST showed that both aspirants have their posters displayed in parts of the state, each presenting himself as the party’s governorship candidate.

Although some political observers have linked the crisis to alleged attempts to weaken the NDC ahead of the election, Makanta, in a separate interview with journalists, however, denied claims that he was in the party to work for Governor Mohammed Umaru Bago or the APC.

Governance Takes Centre Stage

Beyond the shifting political alliances, governance is expected to dominate the conversation ahead of the 2027 governorship election.

Security, infrastructure, public spending, agriculture, education, healthcare, youth employment and the state’s borrowing profile have emerged as some of the issues political parties are expected to campaign on.

Political analyst, Mark Martins said it was still too early to conclude that recent defections would determine the outcome of the election.

According to him, elections are won through effective grassroots mobilisation, party cohesion, voter acceptance and sustained political engagement rather than defections alone.

For Mahmoud Sani, a commercial bus driver in Minna, performance will be the deciding factor.

“It is not going to be about party but individual performance. Even if a candidate has never held public office before, I will look at the person’s antecedents and success story. Nigerians should vote for whoever has the capacity to deliver.”

With campaigns soon to officially commence, political calculations in Niger State remain fluid.

The APC says it has begun reconciling aggrieved members and remains confident of retaining power.

The ADC believes the recent defections and public dissatisfaction have strengthened its chances, while the PDP insists it still has the structure and capacity to challenge for Government House.

The NDC, however, faces the immediate task of resolving its internal disputes before presenting itself as a viable alternative.

For many residents, party affiliation alone may no longer be enough.

As political parties continue to mobilise support and consolidate their positions, the ultimate verdict will rest with the electorate, whose votes will determine whether the ruling APC secures another term or whether the opposition succeeds in changing the political direction of Niger State.

Business

How Systems-Driven Education Interventions Can Rebuild Nigeria’s Workforce

Published

5 hours ago

July 31, 2026

Preport

PRESS RELEASE—Nigeria’s most damaging infrastructure deficit may not be roads, power or ports, but a weak education system producing too few work-ready citizens for an economy seeking to industrialise, digitalise and compete. With about 10.5 million primary-school-age children out of school and only about one in four children aged 7 to 14 able to read a simple sentence or handle basic numeracy, education can no longer be treated as a peripheral social concern. It is core national infrastructure.

This is why Nigeria must move beyond the old model of corporate philanthropy in education — the one-off donation, ceremonial scholarship or isolated classroom block — and encourage interventions that strengthen the full learning pipeline. The NNPC/Seplat Energy Joint Venture’s education model offers a useful example because it spans teacher development, student competition, school infrastructure, scholarships and entrepreneurship support. Its value lies not only in scale, but in structure: it treats education as a system, not a photo opportunity.

Host Community Impact at a Glance

34% of Seplat’s 780 undergraduate scholarships have gone to students from host communities.
The Seplat JV PEARLs Quiz is open to secondary schools in Delta, Edo and Imo States, with more states to follow.
Since 2012, PEARLs Quiz has impacted 61,035 teachers and students.
₦101 million in prize funding has supported school projects such as libraries, classroom blocks and buses.
STEP has recorded 1,334 educators trained, including 1,232 secondary-school teachers and 102 Ministry of Education staff.

Too often, companies still approach education through isolated gestures that create goodwill but little systemic change. Nigeria now needs a more disciplined and ambitious full value-chain approach that addresses teachers, students, learning environments, progression pathways and employability as linked parts of one ecosystem.

What distinguishes the Seplat model is that it works across several pressure points at once. Teacher quality is improved through structured capacity building. Student motivation is reinforced through academic competition and recognition. Schools receive infrastructure support. Scholarships widen access to tertiary education, while entrepreneurship training connects learning to economic independence. The logic is simple: if a system is broken at several points, meaningful intervention cannot occur at only one.

The same systems thinking is visible in host communities and host states. PEARLs Quiz rewards academic excellence while leaving behind assets that strengthen schools long after the competition ends. STEP focuses on the teacher as the multiplier: a scholarship may transform one student, but a strong teacher can influence hundreds over time. The undergraduate scholarship allocation also shows a balance between national reach and local responsibility, recognising the special obligation companies have to communities closest to their operations.

The policy lesson is clear. Every serious sector in Nigeria depends on education for its future workforce: energy needs engineers and technicians; healthcare needs skilled professionals; agriculture and manufacturing need technical competence; and the digital economy needs software, design and analytical talent. Poor education today becomes poor productivity tomorrow. Private-sector participation in education should therefore be recognised not as optional benevolence, but as enlightened self-interest and national economic strategy.

For government, the task is to mobilise private-sector capital and execution capacity through intentional partnerships with federal and state education authorities. For companies, the challenge is to move from random acts of generosity to structured interventions that improve learning quality, teacher capability, school infrastructure and access pathways. For the media, the responsibility is to distinguish interventions that genuinely move systems from those that merely generate headlines.

Seplat Energy’s model is worthy of attention because it goes beyond the one-off gesture. It links teachers to students, students to facilities, facilities to opportunity, and opportunity to long-term development. Nigeria does not need just more corporate interventions in education; it needs better-designed ones

The post How Systems-Driven Education Interventions Can Rebuild Nigeria’s Workforce appeared first on Business Today NG.

News

Anthropic says its own AI models breached three companies during security tests

Published

5 hours ago

July 31, 2026

Preport

Anthropic said Thursday that an internal investigation uncovered three incidents in which its AI model Claude breached the systems of three organizations while conducting cybersecurity tests. The investigation, and disclosure, comes more than a week after OpenAI disclosed that one of its unreleased models breached Hugging Face’s systems during internal testing.

In all three cases, a Claude model reached the internet from within a testing environment while interacting with a third party and then gained unauthorized access to the live systems of these organizations, Anthropic said in a blog post, describing what it found and what the company plans to change to prevent this from happening again.

Anthropic said the July 21 OpenAI incident prompted the company to conduct its own cybersecurity evaluation. It specifically looked for evidence that Claude had accessed the internet from within testing environments, which are designed to act as sandboxes and keep models isolated.

Among the 141,006 evaluation runs it reviewed, the AI lab found three incidents in which its model accessed the internet while interacting with Irregular, one of its third-party partners. Anthropic said the access traced back to a misconfiguration in the evaluation environment run with Irregular. It called this a “misunderstanding” between the two companies over whether the test setup had internet access, when in fact it did. Anthropic said it isn’t placing blame and is “approaching the fixes as if the responsibility were ours alone,” while observing that Irregular is conducting its own separate investigation.

Either way, because of that open connection, the model gained unauthorized access to the production infrastructure of three different organizations. Anthropic said the incidents involved three different Claude models: Opus 4.7, Mythos 5, and an internal research test model.

Notably, Anthropic said that in each of these cases “Claude was explicitly told by our prompt that it had no internet access.” It appears that the AI model assumed real-world systems to be part of the exercise it was asked to perform.

That assumption didn’t hold up uniformly, as it turns out. The three models didn’t behave the same way once evidence emerged that their targets were real, which Anthropic flagged as one of the more eye-opening findings.

Opus 4.7, the oldest of the three, recognized that it had reached a real production system in all four runs of that incident. In two of them, it rationalized that the real company must somehow be part of the exercise, but in all four, it kept attacking anyway, including pulling credentials and touching a database of production data. Mythos 5 also picked up on signs that it was on the real internet, but it talked itself back into believing it was still in a simulation, going on to publish a malicious software package to the public Python software registry PyPI, which was downloaded and run by outside systems before being caught. Only the internal research test model, Anthropic’s newest, stopped on its own once it concluded the target was real.

In response, Anthropic said significant controls must be placed on these kinds of evaluations if powerful AI models are involved, echoing some sentiments within the cybersecurity community.

The company also noted that Claude was running without the additional safety monitoring and classifiers it deploys on generally available models, safeguards it said would have blocked the behavior, because the evaluations are designed to measure the underlying model’s raw capabilities.

Importantly, Anthropic said it found no evidence of any model “pursuing a goal of its own” and instead merely tried to complete the task it was asked to do.

Though comparisons between the two incidents are inevitable, Anthropic drew a clear distinction between its incidents and OpenAI’s, noting where OpenAI’s model exploited an unknown software vulnerability to break out of its test environment, Anthropic’s models instead reached the internet through a path that had, by mistake, been left open.

OpenAI has continued to release new details about its own breach, saying its models also used publicly exposed credentials across four accounts on four services: one as a staging point, one for storage, and two that were only looked at, not used to break in further, according to OpenAI’s own updated blog post about the incident.

Anthropic also drew a distinction between itself and OpenAI by noting that it discovered the incidents itself, through a proactive review, and that the two affected organizations it was able to reach hadn’t previously detected the activity or flagged it to Anthropic.

The company added that it’s now working with the independent evaluation group METR on a third-party review of the incidents.

OpenAI’s accidental breach of Hugging Face, which was the first verifiable case of an AI lab losing control of its model, sparked a string of reactions from the industry and politicians, many of whom don’t necessarily agree with one another. This latest disclosure from Anthropic ensures the debate over AI models and security will continue.

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