2023 Governorship: The Upsets, the Holdouts, and What Changed

Nigeria's 2023 governorship elections ran alongside the presidential and National Assembly votes, producing results in states where gubernatorial terms were expiring. The outcomes reinforced APC dominance in most of the North while delivering a significant first for the Labour Party and confirming PDP's grip on parts of the South-South and South-East.

Our database tracks all 424 governorship candidacies from 2023, covering every party-field entry across the states that held elections that year.

APC's structural advantage held

The APC came into the 2023 cycle as the party in power in a majority of Nigerian states, and the incumbency advantage largely held. Sitting APC governors completing their terms handed power over to party successors in most cases; in the competitive contests, federal resources and the party's organizational depth often proved decisive.

The party also won in Benue, a North-Central state that had been a PDP holdout, with Hyacinth Alia defeating incumbent-party candidates in a race that tightened the APC's hold on the Middle Belt.

Labour Party's single breakthrough

The biggest surprise of the 2023 governorship cycle was Alex Otti's win in Abia State on the Labour Party ticket. Otti, a former banker who had contested and lost in 2015 and 2019 on the APGA platform, switched to LP and won decisively. It was the first time LP had won a governorship in Nigeria.

The Abia result came in the same wave of anti-PDP sentiment that drove Peter Obi's presidential performance in the South-East. PDP had governed Abia since 1999, a 24-year stretch, and Otti broke it. His profile on NGElections is at candidate/alex-chioma-otti.

PDP's southern strongholds

PDP retained Rivers State with Siminalayi Fubara, who won in complicated circumstances: the outgoing governor, Nyesom Wike, had publicly endorsed Tinubu over his own party's presidential candidate, making Fubara's position as PDP governor while navigating Wike's loyalists one of the stranger political inheritances of 2023.

PDP also held Enugu, Adamawa, Plateau, and Akwa Ibom, preserving its southern base even as the party lost the presidency for the second consecutive cycle.

Notable results

What the 2023 map means for 2027

Governorship elections in Nigeria are staggered: some states go to the polls in off-cycle years (Anambra, Edo, Ekiti, Osun, Ondo). The 2023 governors serve four-year terms, which means 2027 governorship elections will run alongside the presidential vote in most of the states that held elections in 2023.

That creates compounding dynamics: sitting APC governors with re-election ambitions will need to deliver state-level results for the party's presidential candidate simultaneously. In states where a governor is term-limited, the successor primary contest often becomes a proxy war for presidential factions within the party, as played out visibly in Rivers State in 2023.

The full governorship election page has every candidate from 2023, with results where INEC has certified them.