I DON’T think in recent memory, any by-election in this country has generated as much blood, bile and bad blood as Saturday’s Osun State governorship election. We have had Anambra and Ekiti in recent times, and nobody heard a whimper. But the news coming out of Osun has been anything but peaceful.
You would be forgiven for thinking Osun is the richest, most strategic state in the federation, given the scale of the drama trailing a single governorship contest.
Barely days to the poll, suspected political thugs reportedly killed the nephew of Hon. Oluwole Oke, Director-General of the APC governorship campaign council, in Esa-Oke. An Accord Party supporter, Aderogba Ajayi, was also shot dead in the same town in June, with protests trailing his killing. Both the APC and Accord have spent the weeks since trading blame over shootings, destroyed property and intimidated supporters across the senatorial district. Mind you, this is not a war zone. This is supposed to be a democratic election in a Nigerian state in 2026, not a re-enactment of some forgotten communal skirmish.
Esa-Oke, in Obokun Local Government Area, has become the flashpoint everybody now watches nervously. A town most Nigerians outside Osun had never heard of before this campaign season is now shorthand for how badly a governorship contest can curdle. When a party chieftain’s relative and a rival party’s supporter can both be gunned down in the same small town within months of each other, that is not politics as usual. That is a community sitting on a keg of gunpowder, and everybody with a microphone in Osun right now needs to stop fanning the flame.
Then came the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission(EFCC). On August 5, the commission obtained a court order freezing the accounts of the Osun State Government, citing an alleged diversion of N11 billion in ecological and intervention funds. Ten days to a governorship election. President Bola Tinubu, in a statement two days later, said he was embarrassed by the timing of the action and directed the EFCC to return to court and vacate the order. He was careful to say he was not questioning the commission’s statutory powers, only its sense of timing.
Now, forgive my scepticism, but I have covered this country long enough to know that timing in Nigerian politics is never accidental. Either the EFCC genuinely stumbled on N11 billion worth of financial recklessness ten days before an election and could not wait one more month, or somebody somewhere decided that an incumbent governor seeking re-election needed to sweat a little. Both possibilities are troubling.
The Osun State Government has denied the allegations and dismissed the freeze as politically motivated, while the African Democratic Congress(ADC) presidential candidate ,Atiku Abubakar has called it an assault on democracy. The former vice president is entitled to his outrage, though I recall he was rather quiet when similar tactics were deployed against opponents he did not particularly like.
As if the freeze wasn’t dramatic enough, a video emerged showing Senator Francis Fadahunsi, who represents Osun East, allegedly instructing his supporters in Yoruba to confront and kill members of the rival Accord Party. The clip went viral, the police invited him for questioning in Osogbo, and Nigerians did what Nigerians do best online, they went to work on him. His defence? He never meant physical violence. He was speaking metaphorically about defeating Accord with votes. Nigerian politicians only discover the poetic side of the Yoruba language when a camera catches them saying something they shouldn’t have.
I am not a linguist, but I know incitement when I see grown men rallying supporters with words like “kill” three weeks after a real killing in the same senatorial district. If Fadahunsi genuinely meant votes, God forbid he should ever campaign near a graveyard, because the choice of words in that video was reckless at best. Nigerian politics is never about ideology. It is about which side is winning this particular Saturday.
Now to something that actually deserves a compliment, and I don’t hand those out often on this page. I watched the town hall organised by Arise News for the Osun candidates, and Governor Ademola Adeleke’s performance genuinely surprised me. We had all been fed the narrative that the governor was inarticulate, that his media handlers kept him wrapped in cotton wool because he could not hold his own in public. He proved that narrative wrong. This should be a lesson to every image manager in Nigerian politics who thinks shielding their principal from scrutiny is the same thing as protecting them. Sometimes the shield is the problem, not the solution.
But let’s not get distracted by debate performances and forget the real story here. Osun is a two-horse race between Adeleke of Accord and Bola Oyebamiji of the APC, with Najeem Salam of the ADC as a credible third name. The last two governorship contests in this state were close .Nobody sensible is expecting a landslide on Saturday, and anyone predicting one hasn’t been paying attention to Osun’s electoral history. What should worry us is not who wins narrowly, but whether the process that produces the winner can survive frozen accounts, viral kill-videos and armed thugs roaming Esa-Oke.
Let’s talk numbers, because numbers cool the temperature better than outrage does. INEC says 2,339,233 Osun residents are registered to vote across 3,763 polling units in 332 wards, with over 5,000 BVAS machines deployed for Saturday. That is a serious logistical undertaking, and it deserves a serious security posture, not the theatre we have watched so far. Vote buying, sadly, has become as Nigerian as jollof rice at this point, and I expect both Accord and APC to deploy cash at polling units the way market women deploy pepper at Christmas. INEC and the anti-graft agencies have talked tough on vote buying for years. Saturday is another chance to prove that talk was not just noise.
Here is my problem with how this election has been managed by everybody involved, the EFCC, the politicians and even the security agencies. Nobody in a position of federal authority appears to have asked the simplest question before acting: how will this look ten days to a governorship poll? The EFCC has powers, nobody disputes that. But an agency that wants to be trusted as independent cannot keep discovering multi-billion naira infractions with such convenient political timing.
Same goes for whichever politician thought a rally was the appropriate venue to talk about killing rival party members, edited video or not. Next scene please, because Nigerians are getting tired of this script.
What should happen is not complicated. The Inspector General of Police needs visible, neutral deployment in Esa-Oke and every flashpoint community, not officers who disappear the moment thugs from either camp show up. INEC must resist any pressure, from Abuja or from Osogbo, and let its BVAS machines and result sheets do the talking. The EFCC, having been told to stand down, should let the courts and not press statements settle whether Osun’s N11 billion actually went missing. And every Osun indigene who has been offered cash to sell a vote that belongs to their children’s future should remember that catching cruise on election day lasts one Saturday, but bad governance lasts four years.
The truth nobody in Abuja wants to admit is that Osun has become a referendum on something bigger than Adeleke, Oyebamiji or Salam. It is a test of whether Nigeria’s federal institutions can stay in their lane during a state election, whether our politicians can disagree without reaching for guns and machetes, and whether ordinary voters can walk to a polling unit on Saturday without wondering if Esa-Oke’s violence will follow them home.
Whoever wins on Saturday should win because the people of Osun decided it, not because an account was frozen at a convenient hour, not because a senator’s supporters felt emboldened by a video, and certainly not because thugs decided who lives to vote and who doesn’t. Osun deserves better than the theatre it has been served in these final days. So does every other state watching to see what precedent gets set here. Anambra managed a governorship poll without this circus. Ekiti did too. There is no reason Osun with all its history should be the state that finally proves Nigerian elections cannot survive contact with federal power and political impatience. The people of Osun, and only the people of Osun, should decide who governs them.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.