By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma (AI-KO)
How Osun State Faced Down the Federal Machine, and What It Leaves Behind for a Nation Counting Down to 2027
By the time the sun rose over Osogbo on Saturday, August 15, 2026, the state of Osun had become something more than a subnational contest for a governor’s seat. It had become a referendum on how much force a ruling party could apply to a single Nigerian state before the state simply refused to bend. Reports from across the political spectrum, from Vanguard to Premium Times to civil society election monitors, would later agree on this much: what unfolded in Osun over the preceding weeks was one of the most naked demonstrations of federal muscle the country had witnessed in years, and one of its most decisive failures. This account was assembled after the fact, from the reporting, statements, court filings, INEC data and eyewitness testimony that surfaced in Nigerian and international press in the days surrounding the vote, not from a personal presence on Osun’s streets, but from the trail of evidence those streets left behind.
Osun’s electorate did not arrive at this contest as strangers to electoral turbulence. The state’s recent history reads like a case study in how fragile a Nigerian governorship declaration can be. In 2018, INEC declared the governorship race inconclusive after shootings, ballot snatching and disruptions across four local government areas forced a rerun; Gboyega Oyetola was eventually declared winner only after a violence-marred second vote in Garage Olode and other flashpoints. The 2022 election was calmer by comparison, though not without its own troubling footnotes, including a dispute over ballot box placement in Ikire that required security intervention before Ademola Adeleke, then flying the flag of the PDP, unseated the sitting APC governor by roughly 28,000 votes, 403,371 to 375,027, a result INEC and independent observers judged broadly credible. It was a painful loss for a ruling party that considered Osun its southwestern fortress, the political base built during the Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola era and central to President Bola Tinubu’s regional project.
Oyetola did not vanish into obscurity after his defeat. He was absorbed into the Federal Executive Council as Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, and from that federal perch he kept his Osun structure warm. A former Osun Commissioner for Finance and Oyetola loyalist, Bola Oyebamiji, was appointed Managing Director of the National Inland Waterways Authority in October 2023, an appointment that forged a direct, traceable line between the minister’s federal muscle and the man who would, in December 2025, emerge as the APC’s consensus candidate after seven rivals stepped aside for him at a primary in Osogbo. President Tinubu did not bother with subtlety when he addressed the outcome: with Oyebamiji’s emergence, he declared, the journey to reclaim Osun for the party had begun. Edo State Governor Monday Okpebholo, chairing the primary’s electoral committee, told the assembled delegates that the APC would win, adding a line that would curdle in hindsight: that the party was “tired of dancing,” an unmistakable jab at a governor the ruling party had spent years dismissing as a lightweight, a man who had allegedly stumbled into office on the strength of a famous surname and a talent for the dance floor rather than any serious command of governance.
That dismissal would prove to be one of the campaign’s costliest miscalculations, and Adeleke seemed to sense it early. Long before the ballots were cast, he had begun reframing himself in blunter, harder language, turning the very mockery aimed at him into a weapon. Speaking at an Arise Television townhall meeting on Tuesday, August 11, four days before the vote, he told viewers he was not worried about facing a party that commanded three dozen state governors. “I am a bulldozer,” he said, daring the APC to “bring all their Governors,” insisting they were all his friends but that none of them could vote in his state. It was a calculated piece of political theatre, delivered with the timing of a man who understood exactly what was coming, and it would go on to define how both the press and the public narrated the outcome once the votes were counted.
Money moved against the incumbent before a single vote was cast, and the manner of its movement deserves to be laid out in full because it is the clearest documentary evidence of the campaign this essay is describing. On August 5, ten days before polling day, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission directed First Bank to place a Post-No-Debit restriction on an Osun State Government statutory allocation account, the very account used to pay civil servants’ salaries. The EFCC’s account of itself was that the freeze had nothing to do with the ballot and everything to do with roughly eleven billion naira in Ecology Funds, Intervention Funds and FAAC disbursements it said it had quietly been investigating since March, and that a sudden burst of transfers into unfamiliar corporate accounts beginning August 2 had forced its hand, declaring that it could not “watch idly while a state government’s account is being pillaged.” Osun’s Commissioner for Information, Kolapo Alimi, called the timing an attempt to cripple government operations ahead of the poll, and Governor Adeleke insisted the Commission had no statutory power to freeze a sitting state government’s account without a court order. Accord’s national chairman, Maxwell Mgbudem, went further still, demanding the release of party members he said had been detained in Abuja, Osun and Nasarawa states, and framing the freeze as one arm of a coordinated squeeze designed to starve the incumbent’s campaign while opposition resources moved freely. Whatever the legal merits on either side, the optics were unmistakable: ten days before an election, a state government discovered it could not reliably pay its own workers.
Then came the blood, and here the record from both camps must be presented side by side, because neither party’s hands were clean. The Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development documented at least thirty-four election-related violent incidents and eighteen deaths across the state in the run-up to the vote, while separate police figures put the toll from politically motivated killings above thirty. The APC alleged that twelve of its supporters were killed within a single twenty-four-hour period, five shot dead at a weekend rally and seven more as members gathered for a rally in Igbogi; on the eve of the election, the Director of Media of the APC Campaign Council, Engineer Remi Omowaye, announced that the nephew of the council’s Director-General had been attacked at his family compound in Esa-Oke, that a relative, Ayegbo Oluwadele, had died, and that another lay critical. The Accord Party countered with a toll of its own, claiming eight of its members killed in the space of a single preceding week, and, in a formal letter dated August 12 addressed to Gautier Migot, head of the European Union delegation to Nigeria and ECOWAS, the party’s national chairman put its cumulative figure at twenty-nine dead and appealed directly to Brussels to intervene. In its own editorial that week, the Punch board did not mince words, writing that dark clouds of violence and intimidation had gathered over the state, and insisting that Osun’s people must not surrender to fear or allow violence to rob them of their democratic rights.
Somewhere inside this fog of dueling grief sat a video that would come to define the atmosphere of the final days: a viral clip of APC Senator Francis Fadahunsi, representing Osun East, appearing to urge supporters to attack Accord Party members. The Osun State Government moved to compel the Nigeria Police Force to investigate, while Fadahunsi insisted the clip had been edited to distort his remarks; the state police command would later confirm it had invited the senator over the incendiary comments. Civil society groups worked overtime to hold the middle ground amid all this. The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre and the Transparency in Nigeria coordinator jointly demanded a legal basis for the deployment of soldiers around INEC’s offices, the Coalition for New Nigeria insisted Osun mustn’t become a theatre of security intimidation, and the Centre for Democracy and Development warned that fears of federal might and military interference bleeding into a state contest were real, not exaggerated. And a former Convener of the Nigerian Civil Society Situation Room, Comrade Ene Obi, went on national television days before the vote to warn that Osun was a pre-test for 2027, that the country’s political class needed to stop weaponising poverty against voters, and that Nigeria was drifting toward what she called a one-party system.
It was into this charged atmosphere that the ruling party staged what can only be described as an imperial procession. On Thursday, August 13, two days before the vote, Osogbo’s Freedom Park became the site of the APC’s grand finale rally, and the guest list read like a printout of the entire federal government relocating itself, however briefly, into a single Nigerian state. President Tinubu did not appear in person but sent Senate President Godswill Akpabio to represent him, telling the crowd that the President had put in place enough security measures to guarantee a free, fair and credible election. Deputy Senate President Barau Jibrin, serving as Secretary of the APC’s national campaign council, was there. Eight sitting state governors descended on Osogbo, among them Babajide Sanwo-Olu of Lagos and Dapo Abiodun of Ogun, alongside a train of federal ministers, senators, House members and former governors mobilised from every corner of the party’s national structure, filling Osogbo with a density of convoys, outriders and blacked-out SUVs the town rarely sees outside of a presidential visit. Former Osun Governor and now Minister of Marine and Blue Economy Adegboyega Oyetola stood before the crowd and promised, with the kind of confidence that would not age well, that the APC would “laugh while they cry” on Saturday. The party’s pioneer national chairman and Osun elder statesman, Chief Bisi Akande, addressed the gathering in more measured tones, describing APC members as peace-loving people, while former National Secretary Senator Iyiola Omisore offered his own vernacular assurance of unity, “A wa papo,” we are together. The party even rolled out an automated mobile campaign stage, a converted trailer supplied by the campaign management firm Monan Innovation. Days later a further, smaller drama played out on the same stage when a faction claiming to represent the Accord Party, led by the party’s expelled 2023 presidential candidate Professor Christopher Imumolen, appeared to announce it was withdrawing support from Adeleke and endorsing Oyebamiji. The Accord Party’s national leadership moved swiftly to dismiss both the endorsement and the man behind it, describing Imumolen as a politician without electoral value or structure.
Not every pillar of Osun’s political and traditional establishment leaned toward the convoy, and it is here that the campaign’s outcome begins to reveal itself in miniature, weeks before a single vote was tallied. The Ataoja of Osogbo, Oba Jimoh Laaroye, publicly backed Adeleke, citing visible infrastructure such as the Lameco flyover as evidence of delivered governance, and reportedly faced threats for saying so aloud. In Ede, the governor’s own hometown, the Timi of Ede, Oba Munirudeen Adesola Lawal, communicated his position with more theatre than any speech could carry: when Oyebamiji’s campaign scheduled a visit to the palace, the monarch simply was not there to receive him, a calculated absence that, in Yoruba political culture, speaks as loudly as any endorsement.
Saturday itself unfolded as a study in contradictions that only a Nigerian election seems able to sustain within a single day. Voters queued from as early as 7 a.m. across the state’s 3,763 polling units in 30 local government areas, voting scheduled to run from 8:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. with anyone already on a queue permitted to complete the process. Election monitors would later describe the poll as mostly peaceful despite reports of vote-buying, technical difficulties and isolated violence. In Ejigbo, suspected thugs disrupted voting at the very polling unit where ADC governorship candidate Najeem Salaam had come to cast his own ballot. Voters in Modakeke and Obokun were reportedly tear-gassed, and ballot box snatching, alleged intimidation and the arrest of suspected electoral mercenaries surfaced in scattered reports through the day. The Bimodal Voter Accreditation System, INEC’s flagship safeguard against rigging, delivered a mixed verdict: operational issues, slow processing and biometric verification failures were reported in several local government areas, forcing some voters to wait for hours while others watched machines simply refuse to cooperate. And yet, imperfectly and at real human cost, the system largely held its ground; economist and ANAP founder Atedo Peterside would later observe that the roughly 43 percent turnout the election ultimately produced was high by recent Nigerian standards, and that strong voter participation remains the most effective safeguard against a rigged result.
The first trickle of polling unit results carried its own dark comedy, the kind that only becomes visible once the melodrama of the convoys has receded and the counting tables under canopy tents take over. At Adeleke’s own polling unit in Osogbo, Accord narrowly edged the APC 57 votes to 43; at a nearby unit the margin was 65 to 43. Hours later, at Railway Station, Ward 5 in Osogbo, the APC’s Oyebamiji won his party’s first polling unit of the entire election outright, 123 votes against a scattering of support for everyone else. The most quietly devastating results of the night, though, belonged to the very architects of the show of force. Former Governor Rauf Aregbesola, now the ADC’s national secretary, watched his own polling unit go to the APC, 256 votes to Adeleke’s 43, while his own party’s candidate managed just 13 votes at the same location. Former Deputy Governor and ex-APC National Secretary Senator Iyiola Omisore lost his polling unit to Accord, as did former Governor Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola. And APC’s sitting national secretary, Senator Ajibola Basiru, despite narrowly holding his own polling unit, lost his entire Osogbo local government to the incumbent, 36,480 votes to 30,474. The generals of the ruling party’s Osun campaign, in other words, could not always hold their own trenches, let alone the state.
Collation carried through the night and into Sunday morning, ward by ward and local government by local government, each figure contested by agents who understood that every vote now had to be defended on paper the way it had been defended, or fought over, on the ground weeks earlier. At approximately 7:24 on Sunday morning, August 16, the returning officer, Professor Joshua Olalekan Ogunwole, Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, declared Ademola Nurudeen-Jackson Adeleke of the Accord Party the winner, having satisfied the requirements of the law. The final numbers were emphatic without being a rout: Adeleke, 511,067 votes; Oyebamiji, 444,815; a margin of 66,252. Najeem Salaam of the ADC trailed a distant third with 17,180 votes, and twelve smaller parties split what remained: the African Action Congress polled 2,308, the African Action Alliance 1,458, the Action Democratic Party 2,946, APGA 1,475, the Allied Peoples Movement 234, the Action Peoples Party 114, the Boot Party 111, the NNPP 118, the PRP 83, the SDP 155, the YPP 534, and the ZLP 2,482. Adeleke carried nineteen of Osun’s thirty local government areas, among them Ede North, Ede South, Ejigbo, Iwo, Egbedore, Ife North, Ife East, Ife Central, Oriade, Ifelodun, Orolu, Ayedaade, Ayedire, Odo Otin, Boluwaduro, Ilesa West, Ifedayo, Osogbo and Irepodun. Oyebamiji held eleven, concentrated in Ilesa East, Boripe, Olorunda, Ife South, Ola Oluwa, Isokan, Obokun, Atakumosa West and Atakumosa East. Total votes cast came to 1,005,800, of which 20,721, roughly two percent, were rejected, against 2,339,233 registered voters, the highest figure in the state’s governorship election history, of whom 81.5 percent had collected their permanent voter cards.
The mathematics of the victory, once laid out local government by local government, told a story more granular than any single statewide margin could capture. In Ede North, Adeleke’s hometown council, Accord polled 35,427 votes against APC’s 10,283, a 25,144-vote gap; in Ede South, the margin was 26,188 to 6,219; the two Ede councils alone handed Accord a combined edge of more than 45,000 votes. In Osogbo, the state capital, Accord’s margin was a tighter but still comfortable 36,480 to 30,474. Adeleke’s coalition extended well beyond his home turf: Egbedore delivered an 8,084-vote margin, Iwo a 7,425-vote margin, Oriade a 6,480-vote margin. The APC’s own strongholds were real, not manufactured. In Irewole, Oyebamiji’s home base, the APC out-polled Accord nearly three to one, 29,972 to 10,934, and in Boripe the party posted a further 7,515-vote advantage, 19,963 to 12,448. Neither margin was replicated widely enough. The APC’s eleven local government victories were real and in places dominant, but they were not evenly enough distributed, nor large enough in aggregate, to offset the scale of what Accord built across the state’s other nineteen councils.
What followed the declaration was, in its way, as revealing as the declaration itself. Osogbo erupted; “Imole, Imole,” the governor’s campaign nickname meaning light, rolled through streets that had spent six tense and bloody weeks unsure whether their votes would be allowed to count for what they intended. Businessday’s own analysis captured the scale of what had just happened, describing the outcome as sending a fresh political signal to the ruling APC ahead of 2027, noting that APC National Chairman Nentawe Yilwatda had himself called Osun a litmus test for the party. Afrobeats star Davido, the governor’s own nephew, who had paused stretches of his music career to lead youth mobilisation for the Imole campaign, celebrated publicly within hours, a moment that briefly turned a state governorship result into a global trending topic, and that same visibility drew him into a brief, well-publicised spat with activist Omoyele Sowore. Congratulations arrived from across a polarised political spectrum in a way that felt almost startling by Nigerian standards. Peter Obi, now positioning himself for his own 2027 presidential run under the ADC banner, congratulated Adeleke and the people of Osun, singling out the courage of the state’s youth for particular praise. Atiku Abubakar sent his own congratulations. And President Tinubu himself telephoned Adeleke to congratulate him, a call the governor referenced with visible relief, thanking the President for what he called an assurance that democracy would continue to flourish. The ADC, whose own candidate had finished a distant third, accepted its defeat with unusual grace.
The APC’s own leadership, by contrast, offered strikingly little. The governors who had abandoned their states days earlier, the ministers who had promised the party would laugh while its opponents cried, the senators and party officers who had filled Freedom Park with sirens and SUVs, were nowhere to be found in the hours after the declaration. There was no filmed outburst, no dramatic walkout at the collation centre, nothing so cinematic as that. What there was, instead, was a quieter and in some ways more damning silence: no press conference explaining to Osun why the machinery that had descended on the state with such visible confidence had failed to deliver, no public reckoning, simply a convoy that had rolled in with sirens blaring rolling back out again without the trophy it came for. As of the declaration, Oyebamiji and the APC had not indicated whether they intended to challenge the result in court, the one avenue that remained technically open to them and that, for the moment, they appeared reluctant to use.
There is an uncomfortable thought worth sitting with once the noise of the campaign has cleared, and it is this: if the same governors, the same ministers, the same senators who abandoned their offices for a week to fill Freedom Park with convoys and promises had instead brought that exact intensity, that exact willingness to drop everything and show up in person, to the actual business of running the country, Nigeria would very likely be a markedly better place today. The logistics alone were staggering. Eight state governors, a Senate President standing in for the President, a Deputy Senate President, federal ministers, national party officers, an automated mobile stage trucked in for the occasion, all mobilised within days, all coordinated to descend on a single state at the same time. That is not a small organisational feat. It requires money, planning, discipline and political will, the very ingredients that, applied to roads, to hospitals, to the naira, to insecurity in the north, to power supply, to the thousand ordinary failures of Nigerian governance that citizens live with every day, could plausibly move the needle on the country’s fortunes. But that capacity was not deployed to govern. It was deployed to campaign, and specifically to campaign for power in a state the party did not yet hold, using instruments, a frozen salary account among them, that arguably made governing harder for the people living under them in the meantime. That is the quiet indictment sitting underneath this entire episode: Nigeria’s ruling class has, when it wants to, demonstrated that it can move fast, move together and move with overwhelming force. It simply tends to reserve that force for elections rather than for the governance those elections are supposed to produce. And on this occasion, even that concentrated force, aimed squarely at the one job it was assembled to do, still lost.
It would be dishonest to read this as a simple story of good triumphing cleanly over evil, or of a ruling party’s federal muscle counting for nothing. The APC did not vanish from Osun’s map. Oyebamiji carried eleven local government areas and, in places like Irewole and Boripe, won by margins that dwarfed anything Accord managed in its own weaker councils. A statewide margin of 511,067 to 444,815 describes a genuinely competitive election, not a landslide rout, and whatever the EFCC’s freeze and the convoy of dignitaries were meant to purchase, they did purchase something real: a party that, four years after being unseated, remains a formidable, well-financed and structurally serious force in a state it once considered its own backyard. What the machinery could not purchase was the six-figure margin its architects had clearly believed a coordinated show of federal force would guarantee. It could not purchase the Ataoja’s endorsement, or the Timi of Ede’s presence in his own palace, or Aregbesola’s own polling unit, or Basiru’s own local government, or the choice of hundreds of thousands of ordinary voters who, despite a frozen salary account, a squadron of ministerial convoys and a body count from a violent campaign season claimed by both sides, still walked to their polling units and voted the way they intended.
There is a dark cloud sitting over this outcome that no celebratory chant can dissolve, and honesty demands it be named plainly rather than folded quietly into a happy ending. Thirty-four documented violent incidents and eighteen confirmed deaths, by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development’s own count, with police figures for politically motivated killings running higher still, are not the hallmarks of a mature democracy; they are a stain that both major parties, whatever their competing casualty ledgers claim about who started it, share responsibility for tolerating. The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre’s pre-election warnings about electoral violence, political intimidation and vote-buying were not alarmist; they were, in the event, largely vindicated.
What Osun offers the country as it turns its attention toward the 2027 general election is neither a guarantee nor an empty gesture, but a genuine, cautionary data point, precisely the kind Comrade Ene Obi warned Nigerians to watch for when she called this election a pre-test in the days before the vote. It suggests that the playbook deployed here, freeze the accounts, empty the federal cabinet into a single state, stage a rally that looks less like a campaign stop and more like a coronation, has a ceiling, and that ceiling sits lower than the party’s own strategists evidently assumed when they filled Freedom Park with governors and senators two days before the vote. It suggests that voter turnout, however imperfect at 43 percent, remains, as Peterside argued, the most durable safeguard against a rigged outcome, because a state that shows up cannot easily be talked out of the result its ballots actually produced. It suggests that a well-delivered record in office, roads, healthcare, visible infrastructure like the Lameco flyover, can still outcompete the promise of proximity to federal power, at least in a state where the incumbent had something concrete to point to. And it suggests, more troublingly, that Nigeria’s political class on both sides of the aisle has not yet learned to contest power without also contesting it in blood, a lesson that thirty-four violent incidents and at least eighteen documented deaths should have taught everyone involved long before a single vote was cast.
Caution belongs in this account as much as celebration does, because generalising a single state’s result into a national prophecy would be exactly the kind of lazy analysis this essay set out to avoid. Osun is one state, with a specific and turbulent electoral history stretching back to the disputed rerun of 2018, a specific incumbent whose own family includes one of the country’s biggest global music stars, and a specific opposition candidate who, for all his federal backing, was still fundamentally a first-time gubernatorial contender running against a sitting governor with four years of visible infrastructure to defend. What Osun does offer, unambiguously, is proof that the tools of federal coercion, frozen accounts, imported convoys, ministerial door-knocking, are not infinitely elastic, and that an electorate pushed hard enough in one direction will sometimes push back in the other, at real cost to itself, but not without effect. Whether the rest of the country remembers that lesson when 2027 arrives, with its own convoys, its own frozen accounts and its own casualty lists still to be written, is the only question left standing once the drums in Osogbo finally go quiet and the trailer that carried the APC’s automated mobile stage sits empty in whatever lot it was towed back to.
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AllAfrica — “Nigeria: Journey for APC to Reclaim Osun Has Begun, Tinubu Declares” — https://allafrica.com/stories/202512150568.html
The Intercept (Nigeria) — “Osun Poll Is Pre-Test For 2027, Ene Obi Warns” — https://www.interceptng.com/politics/osun-poll-is-pre-test-for-2027-ene-obi-warns/
Wikipedia — “2022 Osun State gubernatorial election” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Osun_State_gubernatorial_election
Wikipedia — “2026 Osun State gubernatorial election” — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Osun_State_gubernatorial_election
About the Author
Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, who writes as AI-KO, is a Lagos-based writer, cultural advocate and civic commentator from Abiriba, Ohafia Local Government Area, Abia State. He is Executive Director of the Ndigbo Lagos Foundation, Secretary-General of SESSPN, and has served on the media team of the 2025 Ohanaeze Election Committee and in earlier Ohanaeze leadership roles, including as Publicity Secretary of the 2008 Festival of Igbo Civilization organising committee. He is the author of “Ohanaeze @ 50: The Burden of Memory, The Politics of Relevance,” a critical biographical reflection on the pan-Igbo socio-cultural organisation, and is currently writing a ten-volume work on the history, philosophy, psychology and biography of the Igbo people. He writes on Nigerian politics, governance and civic life with the same conviction he brings to his book projects: that citizens, not just the state, are accountable for the democracy they build. He can be reached at aiko.writes2424@gmail.com.