APM’s Nasarawa ticket now official — and it tells a larger story..
The Independent National Electoral Commission has received the Allied Peoples Movement’s substitute nomination for the 2027 Nasarawa governorship race: Senator Onawo Mohammed Ogoshi as governorship candidate and Dangana Faith as his running mate.
The form is the paper trail of a political calculation that has been unfolding in public for weeks.
This is not a routine filing. It is a substitution. The party’s earlier candidate, Dr Mohamed Auwal — who also chairs APM in Nasarawa — stepped aside after the special delegates congress in Lafia.
Party leaders presented the move as a unity decision: give the ticket to a candidate with wider name recognition, legislative weight, and a southern-zone structure that can travel across the state’s three senatorial districts.
That is the language of a party that knows it cannot win Nasarawa on sentiment alone.
Onawo is not a new face. He is 74, a two-term member and former Speaker of the Nasarawa State House of Assembly, a two-term member of the House of Representatives, and the serving senator for Nasarawa South.
He has won elections in Doma, in the Awe/Doma/Keana federal constituency, and in the senatorial district.
That résumé is why APM wanted him after he left the ADC — and why his critics will immediately call him a serial defector. Both things can be true at once. In Nigerian politics, platforms are often vehicles; the question is whether the vehicle now has a destination.
Onawo’s journey to APM was a search for a stable platform. After leaving the PDP and later the ADC — where he contested the governorship primary — he chose the Allied Peoples Movement as the party with the unity, structure, and space to carry his experience into the 2027 race.
The party received him, held an affirmation congress, and has now put his name on Form EC 9B. For APM supporters; it is evidence that a smaller party can still attract a sitting senator when bigger platforms implode into legal fights and disputed primaries. Now ready to take a tested legislative record into a statewide contest.
The deputy slot matters as much as the top of the ticket. Dangana Faith, 48, female, listed from New Karu, gives the ticket gender balance and a foothold in the Karu–Keffi corridor that sits on the Abuja commuter belt.
Nasarawa elections are often decided by zone, faith, and urban–rural arithmetic. A southern male senator paired with a woman from the west is a classic attempt to stop the ticket looking like a one-zone project.
Dangana Faith’s base in New Karu and the Abuja–Karu corridor is one of the ticket’s real strengths; her networks on the ground are ready to turn that geography into votes as the campaign unfolds.
APM itself is no longer the obscure platform it was a few cycles ago. Under National Chairman Yusuf Mamman Dantalle, with Oyo Governor Seyi Makinde as presidential candidate and Bauchi Governor Bala Mohammed as national leader, the party has been collecting defectors and trying to present itself as a cleaner opposition house.
Nasarawa is a test of whether that national story can be translated into a competitive state race against APC’s Senator Ahmed Wadada, PDP’s Dr Emmanuel Ombugadu, ADC’s Angbazo, and SDP’s former Inspector-General Mohammed Adamu.
That field is crowded. APM does not enter it as favourite. It enters it with a known quantity at the top and a message that the big parties have become too consumed by internal war to govern.
However, from the standpoint of a party well-wisher, this filing is the right kind of seriousness. Auwal’s withdrawal avoided a damaging intra-party stalemate.
Onawo gives APM a candidate who already knows how to win elections in Nasarawa South. The female deputy is a signal, not a decoration. The national party has shown it can complete the paperwork and stay within the Electoral Act’s substitution window.
Nasarawa in 2027 will not be won by nomination forms. It will be won by security, jobs, farming, roads, and whether voters believe the next Government House occupant can hold a diverse state together. APM has now named its pair.
APM has done the first hard part: it settled internally, balanced the ticket, and completed its INEC filing. What remains is the work the party is already prepared for — taking Onawo and Faith to every local government, making the case for inclusive development, and asking Nasarawa to choose a ticket that looks ready for Government House.
The nomination form is not the campaign. It is the starting gun. APM now has a tested senator at the top, a deputy with a live base in the Karu corridor, and a national party behind them. For supporters of the movement, the message is simple: the ticket is set, the paperwork is in, and the road to 2027 is open.
This filing closes the substitution chapter and opens the real one. Onawo and Faith are no longer aspirants on a form. They are APM’s face in Nasarawa — a pairing with experience, balance, and enough reach to take the party’s message statewide with confidence.
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