Both Sides Bled. Only One Side Had the EFCC What Osun actually settled was not who governs Osun. It was the question of what a ruling party in Nigeria may now reach for, and what it costs when the reaching fails. By Ekeh Chidiebebre
Both Sides Bled. Only One Side Had the EFCC
What Osun actually settled was not who governs Osun. It was the question of what a ruling party in Nigeria may now reach for, and what it costs when the reaching fails.
By Ekeh Chidiebebre
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On the fifth of August, a bank in Osogbo received an instruction regarding an account belonging to the Osun State Government. Three words. Post No Debit. The account was one the state used for official transactions, including the payment of salaries. The election was ten days away.
_I want to be careful here, because the story Nigeria is being told this week is the wrong one._
This is not a piece about whether Ademola Adeleke deserved to win. He won, with 511,067 votes to Bola Oyebamiji’s 444,815. A margin of 66,252. The count was published, the loser’s own polling unit went to the winner, and the declaration stands. That question is closed.
The open question is what the eleven weeks before that count revealed about the machinery available to a governing party in this country, and about who may switch it on.
What Does Not Flatter Anybody
The violence in Osun was not one party’s crime. Kazeem Oyewole, an APC supporter and former transport union unit chairman, was killed in Osogbo in January. Kolade Eluyera, son of the Accord Women Leader in Irewole, was recovered with gunshot wounds in Ikire in May. Taofeeq Mustapha, an APC member, was shot in June, reportedly over a cap bearing his candidate’s nickname. Ayegbo Oluwadele, APC, nephew of the party’s own campaign director general, was shot dead in Esa-Oke on the twelfth of August, three days before the poll.
The Nigerian Bar Association counted 73 incidents and roughly 29 deaths between May and July, and its president, Afam Osigwe, said the violence was neither random nor spontaneous but orchestrated, planned and coordinated. YIAGA Africa put the toll above 35. Police records cited in the press put politically motivated killings in the state at no fewer than 30.
Nobody has produced a ledger showing which party supplied which corpse, and anybody who claims to have one is selling something.
The buying was mutual too. Observers deployed across the state recorded 323 offences in 726 polling units on election day, including 103 cases of vote trading, 85 of ballot paper exposure, 28 of inducement of polling and security officials and 25 of thuggery. One hundred and three units is not a solo operation. Somebody was on both sides of that market.
And the incumbent’s camp has its own file. Police confirmed arresting an Accord lawmaker from Irewole and Isokan constituency along with 146 suspected mercenaries in the early hours of election day, after earlier reports of more than a hundred allegedly imported voters. Permanent Voter Cards were recovered, and the command said it was checking whether any were forged. Dataphyte, separately, confirmed an Accord member holding multiple PVCs.
So: both camps had thugs. Both camps had cash. Both camps buried people they will name at rallies for the next four years.
Hold that thought, because it is the entire argument.
Now the Part That Is Not Symmetrical
Only one of those two camps could freeze a state’s salary account.
The EFCC said it had been investigating Osun since March over roughly 11 billion naira in Ecology Funds, Intervention Funds and FAAC allocations, that the Accountant General had been interviewed, and that the freeze itself was prompted by fund movements from the second of August which it called precipitate and unwarranted. Take that account entirely at face value. The investigation may be sound. The transfers may be exactly what the commission says they were.
It changes nothing about the timing, and the timing is the instrument.
Only one camp could put 15,000 police officers into a state of 2.3 million registered voters. Only one camp could see armed military personnel arrive at the INEC office, an arrival CISLAC publicly demanded a legal basis for. Only one camp had a federal police intelligence unit from Abuja conducting arrests before dawn on polling day. Accord’s national chairman said about a hundred of its members and leaders were arrested, some transferred to Abuja, the state Secretary to the Government among them. The party formally demanded the removal of the state Commissioner of Police for partisanship.
Only one camp could move sixteen governors into one state for one election
And only one camp had a candidate whose curriculum vitae is the apparatus in miniature. Bola Oyebamiji was Osun’s Commissioner for Finance under Gboyega Oyetola. In October 2023 he was made Managing Director of the National Inland Waterways Authority on the recommendation of the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, who is Gboyega Oyetola. A federal parastatal chief executive, installed by the former governor now sitting in the Federal Executive Council, sent home to recover the seat.
None of this was hidden. Days before the poll, at the flag-off of an 82 kilometre road reconstruction, Oyebamiji told Osun that electing an APC governor would strengthen the state’s relationship with the Federal Government and attract more infrastructure. Federal money offered as a condition of the vote, at a podium, on camera, in daylight.
That is the difference between the two parties in Osun. It was never moral. It was institutional.
Both camps had thugs. Both camps had cash. Only one camp could freeze a salary account. The difference between them was never moral. It was institutional.
And Yet. Here Is Where an Honest Writer Has to Slow Down
The President reversed it. Within a day Tinubu directed the EFCC to return to court and vacate the order, said the timing could create an impression of federal interference, and said he felt deeply embarrassed. He then telephoned Adeleke. The count proceeded. The declaration was allowed to stand. A governor who is not of the President’s party will be sworn in.
Nigeria has had presidents who would not have permitted the last sentence in that paragraph. That is worth saying plainly, and the applause is not entirely manufactured.
But read what the man actually said, because his defenders have not. He said he was embarrassed not by the EFCC’s exercise of its mandate under a court order, but by the timing of the action. He did not repudiate the freezing of an opposition state’s salary account. He repudiated the calendar. The instrument was never disowned. It was rescheduled.
He also said he learnt of the order after the fact and was yet to be fully apprised of the facts behind it. That leaves two readings, and both are bad. Either the President did not know that a federal agency was moving on a sitting governor’s payroll ten days before an election, or he did. Every man now calling him a democrat has quietly chosen the first, and is therefore congratulating a President for not being in control of his own agencies.
Notice also what the remedy was. Not a statute. Not a court striking down the order on principle. Not an INEC protocol barring financial enforcement action inside an election window. A directive and a phone call. Personal remedies are not remedies. They are favours, and a favour granted is a favour that can be withheld next time.
The EFCC’s own statement said it was keeping watch over the finances of other states, many of them on its investigative radar. The apparatus did not stand down. It took a number and sat back in the waiting room.
The Verdict
The full machinery of a governing party was assembled and switched on in a state of two million voters, and it lost by 66,252 votes.
The sycophants are reading that as proof of democratic health. It is the opposite. A machine that fails is still a machine. What Osun established is that the instruments exist, that they are available on request, that they can be aimed at a salary account in the middle of an election, and that in August 2026 the only thing standing between their deployment and their withdrawal was one man’s discomfort at how it looked.
Restraint that arrives on the fourth day of a scandal is not restraint. It is damage control. A democrat is measured by what he prevents, not by what he reverses once the country has already seen it.
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One More Thing, and It Matters More Than Everything Above
INEC counted honestly. The results went up on the portal, the arithmetic held, and the commission declared against the party that appointed its chairman. That deserves the credit it is receiving.
It also proves less than Nigerians are being invited to believe.
INEC’s writ begins at accreditation and ends at collation. It does not extend to a frozen payroll, or to sixty party members in detention, or to 103 recorded acts of vote trading, or to thirty people who were already in the ground before a single ballot was printed. The commission counted honestly what a dishonest process delivered to it. And even then, 99 polling unit results were still unuploaded, and 20,721 ballots were rejected.
The APC will spend this week arguing that its defeat is itself proof the election was fair. It is not. It is proof the election was countable. Those are different words, and Nigeria should learn the difference before February 2027, because Osun was the last off-cycle governorship before the general election. It was the rehearsal. Everything tried in Osogbo was tried somewhere it could be measured.
Power in Nigeria has stopped bothering to steal elections outright. It has learnt something more durable: that if you can starve a state, arrest its organisers, flood its streets and buy its units, you may not need to touch the ballot at all. And if it still fails, you can call the failure evidence of your own decency.
That is the trick. Not the theft. The absolution that follows it.
Osun did not save Nigerian democracy. Osun showed us the size of the weapon, and told us that its safety catch is currently a mood.
Ekeh Chidiebebre is a political analyst and columnist based in Abuja. He writes at chidosqi.substack.com
