THE governorship election of Osun State, which was an off-cycle election, held last week, and the winner is already known. In fact, incumbent governor, Ademola Adeleke of the Accord Party won, polling 511,067 votes to beat his closest rival, Bola Oyebamiji of the APC who polled 444, 815 votes. All that is no longer news. The APC, ruling at the federal level with President Bola Tinubu since 2023 was widely favoured to win the election. In Nigeria, this is not an unusual wish. The widely-touted incumbency factor, the use of state resources to further party interest, and the deployment of state security outfits on election day have usually helped swing election outcomes in desired directions.
On the eve of the election, APC governors and other party bigwigs stormed Osogbo, the state capital. It was alleged that they came in with resources to be used in securing victory for their party man.
In the Osun case, the outcome was not exactly what was programmed. Since election results were announced, there have been hundreds of analyses in various media — print, electronic and social. There is probably nothing you need to know about what went right for whom and what went wrong for whom that you probably don’t have the intel to discern by now. Some even say the election outcome itself was a programmed game targetted at securing the voter base in the state for the president in next year’s elections.
Whatever the case, the election generated some striking optics. The first, from available video online was how the people of Osun State virtually policed their votes from polling booths to collation centres. One video arrested my attention: a bus in which polling officials were riding, apparently to the collation centre, was being escorted by a tens of men on motorcycles. One of the polling officials was taking a phone call, and one of the men on motorcycle screamed at him: “You’re carrying our votes, and you’re receiving calls. Drop that phone immediately!” That was said to have happened in Ward 3, Okerewe, Ife East LGA of the state.
I was stunned by that development. It shows people protecting their votes because it has happened in the past that ballot boxes first detoured somewhere else between polling booth and collation centre, where they were stuffed, and then gave results entirely different from what was polled during voting.
As of now, it remains an allegation that people bought votes and sold votes. Since nobody has been arrested for this electoral offence, it remains a rumour, at least in the face of the law. The optics in this regard is that people were said to have have collected as sums varying from N20,000 to N30,000, and even N50,000 in some parts of the state. And as the gossip mill in the state is throwing it up, people collected the money from those giving them and still voted the way they wanted. That is another astonishing development.
The redirection for the rest of Nigeria from Osun politics and election is that forthwith, it is no longer enough to vote and go home. As the Osun people did, vote and police your your vote, right up to the collation centre. When uploads ceased for some time on INEC’s IREV portal, there was a howl of protest on the internet, and soon thereafter, the uploads resumed.
Another redirection is that which concerns voter apathy. For the election, 2,339,544, voters registered. On election day, 1,010,684 voters were accredited, reperesenting nearly 50% of accredited voters. Given the spate of voter apathy witnessed in past elections, this is a significant improvement. Added is that more youths participated in the process than usually witnessed. What we are now used to seeing on election day is youths playing football on deserted roads, while others invaded hotel and bars on election day and drank their voting time away. Osun youths did not do that. I would really love a situation where youths stopped this odious habit. They should get their PVCs, vote, and police their votes to make them count.
As for the parties and contestants, it is an interesting scenario. Last Monday, the APC came out and disclosed that internal wranglings made the party lose the election. Well, they know themselves, and may be quite right. Personally, I think the party did not put its best foot forward. In addition, the party underestimated Adeleke. What was not realised is that the image Adeleke cut as a dancing governor is actually a strategy that made his opponents think very little of him.
But deeper than that, my senior colleague and senator, Babafemi Ojudu noted in a 15-point message on why APC lost the Osun election. He fingered as number one “whoever was responsible for the hunger in the land.” Osun people know who. In addition, Osun people, reeling from the effects of insecurity on daily life and living repeatedly warned that people should not vote for kidnappers. I saw a video in which some old women, none of whom could be younger than 75, singing:
E je k’ori yin o pe (2x),
E ma dibo f’awon kinapa o,
E je k’ori yin o pe.
Freely translated: Reason well, don’t vote for kidnappers! And some people sit in their gilded palaces and think ordinary folk do not know the source of their economic and security woes? They may just be waiting for election day to deliver their verdict. That said, the violence that attended electioneering in Osun was something else. At least, no less than 29 lives were lost before election day. All the politicians of Osun, including the one that directly called for the killing of opponents, are responsible for those lost lives. May their souls rest in peace. Next January is the big one. Will we all vote? Will we police our votes? And above all, will we reason well, as in the song above? TGIF.
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