Senator Neda Imasuen enters this argument with honours the APC internal machine cannot erase. In 2026 he was named Most Outstanding Senator of the Year. The same year he received the Distinguished Achievement in Legislative Excellence and Democratic Governance Award at the African Achievers Awards at the House of Lords in London.
Those citations were not issued in a ward collation centre. They were public judgements on legislative work, visibility, and the quality of his first term.
Then came the May 2026 APC primary in Edo South—an intra-party exercise marked by conflicting results, petitions, and complaints grave enough to include the claim that the incumbent could not vote in his own unit. That is the process by which a sitting senator, decorated in Abuja and in London, was frozen out of his party’s ticket. Call it what the facts allow: a disputed primary. Treat it as what it is not: the verdict of Edo South’s voters.
The distinction matters. Voters did not retire Imasuen. A party apparatus did. Organisation is not consent. A collation is not an election. When parallel figures emerge and an incumbent is shoved aside, the burden is on the machine to prove legitimacy—not on the district to accept displacement as destiny.
His electability does not rest on a trophy shelf. It rests on a record that can be named.
In one term he has paired the chair of the Senate Committee on Ethics, Privileges and Public Petitions with work on the ground: road stretches in Orhionmwon and Ovia, scholarships, skills programmes, and advocacy for the National Obstetrics Fistula Centre in Benin.
That is representation people can point to. Awards followed the work; they did not invent it.
There is also the ranking argument, which is about the district, not vanity. Edo South is the largest senatorial district in the state. A second term would give it seniority in the Red Chamber—the only currency that reliably buys attention when federal projects, committee power, and bargaining are being shared.
To replace an incumbent mid-ascent with a first-timer is to reset the clock for an entire district because a party room could not produce a clean contest.
The work is unfinished. Roads still need extension. Skills programmes still need scale. Health institutions still need funding. A ranking voice still needs time. Those are the unfinished items of a first term, not the footnotes of a primary quarrel.
So the message to the APC internal machine should be plain. You may declare a candidate. You may submit a name. You may insist that defeated aspirants have “accepted” the outcome. What you cannot do, with any political honesty, is convert a disputed intra-party exercise into the will of Edo South. The voters have not spoken on Imasuen’s second term. A contested room has.
Whether the remedy is party review, the courts, or another lawful platform, the standard should remain the same. Loyalty is owed to the district. Service, seniority, recognition, and unfinished work still sit with the incumbent.
A disputed primary settled a factional fight. It did not settle the political worth of Senator Neda Imasuen—and it is not the verdict of Edo South.
-Pamela O.
Political analyst and columnist
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