At dawn on Sunday, the 17th of August, Governor Ademola Nurudeen Jackson Adeleke of the Accord Party had been announced as the winner of the governorship election that started less than twenty-four hours earlier. With just over half a million votes cast in his favour, the ebullient governor was returned to office for another four-year term after a bruising campaign that was marked by violence, unseemly vote-buying and unprecedented deployment of security agents. His closest rival in the election, the All Progressives Congress’ Bola Oyebamiji, got a little over 444,000 votes while the other political parties in the election got a combined vote of just about 17,000. Nothing about the outcome should be surprising to watchers of the process that preceded it. Governor Ademola Adeleke was always going to win that election for as long as his toughest challenger was from the APC.
The election was an audit on, if you like, a referendum of the previous 12 years of APC rule in the state. That could be stretched back to even the Chief Bisi Akande years as governor in the mid-1990s when workers, especially teachers, were either retrenched or owed salaries for long periods, resulting in prolonged strike actions by the organised labour. Residents of the State of the Living Spring have historically had a tough time under the rulership of the so-called progressive arm of south-west politics. The most contentious and, no doubt, worst of those years were during the eight-year rule of Rauf Aregbesola. His undoing was his arrogant insensitivity to feedback from the people, signposted by his willful disregard of workers’ plight, his tendency to force down the people’s throats harebrained policies of dubious value, aggravated assault on the religious sensibilities of the people with the indiscriminate merging of schools and the imposition of the same uniforms across different parts of the state, abysmal policies that at once wiped off institutional and historical memories of education stakeholders at the stroke of an overweening politician’s pen, plunging the state into avoidable religious tension and bickering.
All of this was topped by the government’s inability to pay monthly salaries and the accompanying gaslighting narratives built around this, even as the government took loans and incurred debts that became an albatross on the successor Gboyega Oyetola’s administration. The attempt by Oyetola, a relation of President Bola Tinubu and Aregbesola’s chief of staff, to roll back some of these policies in order to win back the goodwill of the people was the beginning of the animosity between the two men. This was besides the fact that Rauf Aregbesola had someone else in mind to succeed him as governor. He never wanted Gboyega Oyetola but he had to defer to Bola Tinubu. All of this backroom wrangling would eventually rupture the longstanding relationship between Rauf Aregbesola and President Bola Tinubu. It is important for those latter-day pundits and social media activists, including opponents of the APC and President Bola Tinubu, looking at Osun state politics from outside to understand this backstory and the subtext to Governor Ademola Adeleke’s reelection victory before reading both their prejudices and wishful thinking into it and thereby ascribing unfounded conspiracy theories, locker-room gossip and inflated meanings to the entire process. What played out before ordinary Nigerians, local and international observers, was local politics writ large. It has near-zero value to ongoing national politics, much less being a statement on the reform policies of President Bola Tinubu or the potential direction of the 2027 general election. If anything, and this is why those misreading the signs would be in for a big surprise, Governor Ademola Adeleke’s victory further extends and consolidates President Bola Tinubu’s hold on the politics of Nigeria, much more so in the south-west.
Even without the benefit of a scientific poll, it is safe to say, based on general observation and informed reading of the field, that the overwhelming majority of last Saturday’s voters in Osun would vote for President Bola Tinubu in the January 2027 presidential polls. This was a deal reached before the governorship election and which Governor Adeleke reaffirmed with his post-election broadcast on Sunday morning. Anyone thinking otherwise, including a former president who publicly renounced his membership of the political party that gave him a chance to be president twice after a three-year spell as a military dictator, by tearing his membership card to shreds — the apparently retired but not tired politician who showed up unannounced at Governor Adeleke’s doorstep holding hands like long-lost lovers and dancing merengue with the governor just hours after he was declared victorious — that president was simply on a failed mission to persuade a politician who has not only been converted to, but was only denied membership confirmation of, the APC by the same Osun APC people who sought to deny him a second term as governor.
Otherwise, both President Bola Tinubu and Governor Ademola Adeleke are at peace and reached a rapprochement, away from the political distance that resulted in the former’s loss of the state in the 2023 election, several months back. This despite the dispute that led to the seizure of Osun State’s local governments’ funds since February 2025. This fact is well known to the APC apparatchiks in Osun. Until their eleventh-hour stampede to get to the finish line, they knew the election was for Adeleke to lose and that would have been sealed with his defection to the APC (which they blocked), which was his instinctive choice once the PDP became a sinking ship from which every passenger bailed out. The Osun electorate was reconciled to the fact of Adeleke’s reelection. Only the likes of Gboyega Oyetola, generally an easy-going gentleman but still smarting from the loss of 2022, and the choleric enforcer, an uncouth brawler of a senator-politician like Francis Fadahunsi, thought they could muster federal might to suppress the popular will of the people. They were the ones the people of character (ipinle omoluwabi) rose up against based on their poor record of governance. Not Bola Tinubu. This point is important to make for whatever it is worth and however it is taken by those who would want it otherwise.
Heavily monetised and securitised, with a vote selling for as much as 50,000 naira in some cases, a commissioner of police assigned to each of the thirty LGAs, 30,000 security personnel and 30 deaths across party lines, the Osun governorship election was perhaps the most keenly contested and contentious state election in recent memory. It is remarkable that neither the average social media commentator, the CSOs, nor the opposition that fielded candidates but has been inebriated with Adeleke’s victory, has made much of these obvious shortcomings that would have been their talking points had the APC won.
The post How not to read Governor Adeleke’s victory, by Rotimi Fasan appeared first on Vanguard News.