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.
