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.
