The All Progressives Congress just recorded its strongest ever vote in an Osun governorship election. It lost by the widest margin it has ever lost by. Both things are true, and holding them together is the only way to understand what happened on 15 August.
The Independent National Electoral Commission declared Governor Ademola Adeleke re-elected on the morning of 16 August. He polled 511,067 votes to Bola Oyebamiji’s 444,815 — a margin of 66,252, and 19 of the state’s 30 local government areas against the APC’s 11. Fifteen parties contested. The Peoples Democratic Party, which Adeleke won under four years ago, did not field a candidate at all.
That last detail is the first clue that this was not a normal rematch.
The number that actually matters
In 2022, Adeleke beat the incumbent Gboyega Oyetola by 28,344 votes — about three and a half percentage points. This time the gap was 66,252, or roughly seven points. BusinessDay’s analysis puts it plainly: the margin roughly doubled.
What makes that striking is that the APC’s own vote went up. Oyebamiji outpolled Oyetola’s 2022 total by a comfortable distance. The party did not collapse, did not lose its base, and did not fail to turn out its people. It ran harder than last time and still went backwards relative to its opponent.
A party that loses while growing has a specific kind of problem. It is not a mobilisation problem. It is a coalition problem — the other side is growing faster, and the ground you are not winning is expanding.
Explanation one: the APC beat itself
This is the version the APC itself is running with, and it is not merely spin — the evidence for it was visible months before polling day.
The trouble started with candidate selection. Senator Iyiola Omisore, a heavyweight with his own following, was disqualified at the screening stage over nomination paperwork, a rationale he rejected outright. Seven aspirants subsequently fell in behind Oyebamiji as a consensus pick after a meeting with President Bola Tinubu. Consensus arrived at that way tends to look like unity from the top and like exclusion from below.
By June, The Sun was reporting a wave of resignations from figures aligned with Omisore. Tribune’s reporting a month later described the deeper damage as quieter than the departures themselves: the rank and file drew the conclusion that loyalty bought no protection from the Oyetola-led leadership.
Then there is Rauf Aregbesola. The former governor’s split with Oyetola helped hand Adeleke the state in 2022; this time Aregbesola’s political protégé Najeem Salam ran on the African Democratic Congress ticket, keeping that faction outside the APC tent for a second consecutive cycle.
After the result, an APC chieftain conceded on national television that the party had “defeated itself” in Osun, citing disagreement over the candidate and complacency about Adeleke.
Explanation two: Adeleke built something
The self-sabotage story is satisfying but incomplete, because it treats Adeleke as a passive beneficiary. The vote suggests otherwise.
He fought this election on an entirely different platform from the one that elected him. Having left the PDP for Accord, he had to carry his coalition across to a party with no governorship history in the state — and did, delivering Accord its first ever Osun governorship win. Party structure did not move those voters. Something else did.
Analysts have pointed to the consistency of salary payments in a period of severe national economic strain, a factor that tends to be underrated from a distance because it is undramatic and enormously material to the people receiving them. TheDigger’s feature also emphasises terrain the APC contested less effectively — traditional institutions, chieftaincy disputes, ward-level relationships, the neighbourhood figure who can move fifty votes.
The Davido factor
The governor’s nephew is the Afrobeats star Davido, and treating his involvement as colour rather than substance would be a mistake. BellaNaija reports he served as head of youth mobilisation for the re-election bid, appearing at rallies through the campaign.
He was also an active combatant online. On election night, with counting underway, Leadership quoted a series of his posts claiming APC losses in symbolic wards and urging Osun voters to stay vigilant overnight — including the line “Osun no be Edo!”, a pointed reference to a previous contested governorship result elsewhere. After the declaration he posted a video captioned simply “WE DID IT UNC !!!”
How much this moved votes is unknowable, and celebrity endorsement has a poor record of converting attention into turnout in most democracies. But it did something measurable: it kept the contest continuously visible to a young, online, heavily diaspora-adjacent audience, and it meant attacks on Adeleke drew immediate amplified responses. In a state race decided by 66,252 votes, attention is not nothing.
Explanation three: the federal weight did not transfer
Oyebamiji campaigned with the visible backing of the presidency and the APC’s national machinery, in a state with a particular claim on Tinubu’s political origins. Daily Trust framed the outcome as a question larger than one candidate’s performance.
Whether an off-cycle state election can be read as a verdict on a federal government is genuinely contested, and worth resisting the easy version of. Governorship races turn heavily on local factors, and Osun has a long record of ignoring national momentum. But the APC deployed federal weight and did not convert it, and that is a real finding regardless of how far you extend it.
What is not yet settled
The APC has said it is reviewing the results and may pursue legal options. That history is worth remembering: Adeleke’s 2022 win was nullified at tribunal before being restored on appeal and upheld by the Supreme Court in May 2023. A declared result in Nigeria is frequently the start of the process rather than the end of it.
Vote totals also vary slightly between outlets — some report Adeleke on 511,677 rather than 511,067. Small, but a reminder that early figures firm up over days.
Why this matters from abroad
If you are following Nigeria from outside it, the temptation with a result like this is to read it as a national scoreboard — a signal about 2027, a referendum on Abuja. That reading is available and every party will now push its own version of it.
The more useful lesson is narrower. Osun demonstrates that Nigerian state politics still runs substantially on its own logic: candidate selection, factional grievance, whether salaries arrive, who holds the ward. Federal endorsement did not override any of that. For anyone trying to anticipate 2027 from a distance, the takeaway is that national-level analysis will keep missing things that are decided at ward level, in states, by people with local grievances that never make the front page.
Reporting drawn from Premium Times, BusinessDay, Daily Trust, Vanguard, The Sun, Tribune, Channels Television and TheDigger. Analysis is my own. Figures were accurate as of 19 August 2026 and may be revised.
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