In concluding my piece here two weeks ago on the Osun State governorship election that is scheduled to hold on Saturday this week, I had suggested that Governor Ademola Nurudeen Jackson Adeleke had successfully skirted around the political landmine represented by the federal might that could have been deployed against him to threaten his chances in the election by President Bola Tinubu. I was not being prematurely sanguine in reaching that conclusion about the attitude of President Bola Tinubu to the Osun State election. My conclusion was based on the pragmatism of Governor Ademola Adeleke’s decision to support the re-election bid of President Bola Tinubu against the backdrop of his thwarted attempt to decamp from the Peoples Democratic Party to the All Progressives Congress, from where he had decamped to the PDP in 2017.
President Bola Tinubu had up to the last couple of weeks assumed what would seem a neutral position in who becomes the next governor of the State of the Living Spring between the two leading contenders, the incumbent Ademola Adeleke, and the APC candidate, Asiwaju Munirudeen Bola Oyebamiji, aka AMBO, the former finance commissioner in the administration of Governor Gboyega Oyetola, the former chief of staff in the Rauf Aregbesola administration that I had in my earlier intervention on this subject erroneously referred to as a former deputy governor. While Abuja had since February 2025 seized Osun State local governments’ allocation following the disputed control of the local governments between the Oyetola-led APC and its successor PDP government at the LGA level, the decision had been portrayed as a local issue that would be determined on entirely legal principle between the APC and the PDP in Osun State. This was the case even if the fund seizure was at the behest of the Bola Tinubu-led federal government through the office of the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Chief Lateef Fagbemi.
President Tinubu had during this time maintained a respectable distance from the dispute and had warmly received both the governor and his older sibling, Dr. Deji Adeleke, in audience. It was as if whatever might be going on in Osun State concerning local political disputes was between the governor, his party and his opponents in the APC. But the state branch of the APC under the leadership of Governor Adeleke’s old rival, Gboyega Oyetola, had always taken an aggressively uncompromising, even hostile, attitude to Governor Ademola Adeleke, his government and the policies of the government. It was in that mood that they blocked the governor’s attempt to join the APC when, due to internal wrangling, the PDP came apart at the seams and became a sinking ship from which every politician was desperate to bail out. Had Adeleke been allowed in, he would have become the leader of the APC in Osun and automatically picked the ticket as the APC candidate in this week’s election.
The contest between Governor Ademola Adeleke and his old APC rivals has become more contentious and chaotic in the few days leading to the election. The violence that has characterised politics in the state and which goes back to the end of late 2024 to the beginning of 2025 has increased exponentially in the last seven days with accusations and counteraccusations of violence and the resort to self-help in canvassing and countering opposing views. At the centre of this all is the perception that Abuja has given up its neutral stand as the display and actual deployment of federal might has been alleged. This is where President Bola Tinubu is perceived to have swung behind his party’s candidate, jettisoning whatever gentlemanly agreement there might have been between him and Adeleke. The gloves are being taken off and the APC, at both the local and federal levels, suddenly seems determined to make Osun the 32nd state under their direct control.
While the Accord Party influence is limited to what Governor Adeleke and his family have to mobilise, including the star power of the governor’s nephew, Davido, a leading afrobeats musician who occasionally puts his foot in his mouth, the APC has brought the full weight of the party’s leadership machinery across the country to bear on the election with incumbent and former governors and leaders of the party trooping into Osogbo to give their support to their candidate. Not even former governor Kayode Fayemi, who has kept a sullen distance away from the APC while appearing to be fraternising with APC opponents in both the NDC and ADC, wants to be left out. They are all making their way to Osogbo. This could be intimidating to anyone not courageous enough to take the heat, much less a governor who many had thought the election was his to lose until a few weeks ago.
He is not giving up, though, despite apparent acts of intimidation including the arrest in the last one week of key members of his team, including the secretary to the state government, Teslim Igbalaye, and the commissioner for the environment and sanitation, Mayowa Adejoorin. It all culminated with the freezing of an account of the state government by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission. It took the intervention of President Bola Tinubu in what would seem an attempt at seizing a political moment to grab the headlines for that decision to be rescinded following national outcry. The balance of terror seems even and neither side appears ready to blink. Whereas in 2018 Adeleke was carefree enough to let his victory go beneath the quicksand of ‘government magic’, that is INEC’s and the courts’ manipulative antics, then the election was declared inconclusive. Now he has tasted power, he knows it is sweet and he is not likely to give it up without a fight. And whatever the outcome of the election, whoever emerges the winner will be grateful for making it through the crucible of this fraught campaign and emerging from it alive.
