By EMAMEH GABRIEL
The heavy, suffocating tension that hung over Osun State in the days leading to the Saturday, August 15 governorship election dissipated within hours after voting had commenced. Most Nigerians had assumed that President Tinubu would use the Osun election as a dry run for his 2027 re-election machinery, a chance to test his muscle and send a message. The opposition saw it differently. For them, it was a golden trap, one they hoped Tinubu would stumble into so they could parade his mistakes before the international community as evidence of authoritarian drift.
Atiku Abubakar and his camp saw Osun as their best chance to put President Tinubu on the defensive before January 2027. That much was clear. Adeleke’s victory was not in their play book—in fact, he was the least of their interest. After all, why would they stake anything on a man who abandoned the PDP for another party, declined to join them in the ADC or NDC, and after pitching his tent with Acord Party and then turned around to endorse President Tinubu? Atiku is not one to take such a risk. Not for anyone. Adeleke was simply a lamb they were ready to sacrifice at the altar of their own ambition. The ploy called to mind the trader who walks into the market with one Kobo and wouldn’t bat an eyelid if the entire market burned down. The ADC candidate’s performance at the poll tells that story better.
But Tinubu, ever ahead, refused to take the bait. Instead, he flipped the script and made the election truly competitive and left it where it rightly belonged: with the people of Osun. To the chagrin of his detractors, the gamble paid off. He is truly the best in the game. A skilled gambler knows when to step away to focus on the bigger picture.
For most Nigerians, the experience across decades has been a brutal education and has lowered their expectations. The history is well known: June 12, the elections during the Obasanjo era, the contested outcome of 2007, the IReV failures of 2019 and others that followed. Each episode, in its own way, eroded whatever faith remained in the process. So when the EFCC moved to freeze Osun State’s accounts just ten days before the poll, it was not difficult to predict the mood of a section of the country. Nigerians, having been here before, braced up.
The critics wasted no time. Atiku cried foul about federal agencies being weaponised. Femi Falana raised constitutional questions. The Minority Caucus screamed intimidation. The narrative wrote itself: Tinubu was strangling an opposition governor with the long arm of the EFCC to hand the state to his party’s man. It was an old script that we have seen too many times.
But the President tore up the script. He refused to defend the EFCC—instead, he condemned the Commission’s action, publicly expressed embarrassment, and directed that it stand down. More significantly, he personally reached out to Governor Adeleke and assured him that the process would be fair.
Except that this time, the President tore up the script.
On Sunday, August 16, with the ballots counted and Adeleke declared victorious, Tinubu simply picked up the phone and congratulated the man who had defeated his party — and did this even before the returning officer had finished reading the final results.
The cynics were proven wrong again. President Tinubu placed Nigeria above party interest. This is not the first time they have miscalculated Tinubu and it won’t be the last
Yet we must also give credit where it is due. The Independent National Electoral Commission came into this election with its reputation battered. Many had written off INEC before the first ballot was even cast. But against all expectations, the Commission showed up. It deployed its materials on time, ensured the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System functioned as designed and transmitted results with a transparency that caught even the most cynical observers off guard.
INEC did not become the story. It simply did its job, and in doing so, it beat the low expectations that Nigerians had sadly come to accept as the standard.
That feat deserves to be acknowledged, and I acknowledge it without reservation. But let us not pretend that this happened in a vacuum. The Commission’s performance was made possible by something else entirely: the clear signal from the highest office in the land that interference would not be tolerated. President Tinubu set the tone early, and that tone filtered down through the entire machinery of state. He made it known that the election would be allowed to run its course, and that assurance gave INEC the room it needed to operate without the usual pressures from interested parties. The Commission showed up and delivered, yes, but it was Tinubu’s decision to step back that created the space for them to do so.
Adeleke, in his victory speech, did something that caught many off guard. He thanked Tinubu. Not with the usual obligatory platitudes, but with a deliberate nod to the President’s role in preserving the democratic framework—acknowledging that Tinubu had called to congratulate him and that, whatever else one might think of the man, he had fought for democracy. This was significant, coming from a governor whose victory had disappointed a good number of people who had expected a different result. But Adeleke, for all his folksy demeanor, is no fool. He knows that in this game, you don’t burn bridges you might need to cross tomorrow. In thanking Tinubu, Adeleke did more than extend courtesy—he signalled to his supporters, his rivals, and the presidency itself, that he understands the bigger picture.
Imagine what might have happened had the President chosen to look the other way and damn the consequences as many had done in the past. That is no small thing. He did what few Nigerian leaders in his position would have done. He allowed the process to unfold without interference. He honoured the verdict of the people, even when it did not favour his party.
This is the man his critics have spent months painting as a strongman in waiting, a democrat with authoritarian instincts, a man who would stop at nothing to consolidate power. They said so many things about him, his battles with the opposition, his willingness to use federal power against political opponents. They constructed a narrative of a President who would rather break the system than be broken by it. Then came Osun, and that narrative fell apart completely.
The opposition, for its part, finds itself in an uncomfortable position entirely of their own making. They had spent weeks preparing their condemnations, sharpening their attacks, and rehearsing the appeals they would make to the international community. They had cast Governor Adeleke as the hapless victim and President Tinubu as the heavy-handed oppressor. They had written a script in which the President would overreach, the election would be stolen, and they would emerge as the valiant defenders of democracy against authoritarian assault. Every line of that script was carefully crafted, every scene meticulously planned.
Instead of the tragedy they had anticipated, they got a free and fair contest, a decisive result, and a President who accepted the outcome with a dignity that caught everyone off guard. The conspiracy theories they had peddled found no evidence to cling to. The international condemnations they had prepared found no substance to attach themselves to. Their carefully constructed narrative of victimhood simply dissolved in the face of a process that refused to cooperate with their expectations.
Atiku Abubakar, who had positioned himself as the leading voice against executive overreach, now must contend with the reality that his worst fears did not materialise. The election they had dismissed as a foregone conclusion, a mere formality in which the fix was already in, turned out to be genuinely competitive. His candidate lost, yes, but he lost fairly, and that is an outcome the opposition must learn to accept even when it does not favour them. Democracy, after all, is not a system designed to produce winners that please us. It is a system designed to reflect the will of the people, and the people of Osun have spoken, the same way Nigerians did in 2023.
This is the difficult lesson of democracy: sometimes you lose. And when you lose, you must lose with grace, just as Tinubu demonstrated in victory. The opposition’s challenge now is to internalise this lesson, to recognise that crying foul when there is no foul only diminishes their credibility for the occasions when foul truly exists.
For Governor Adeleke, the victory carries its own weight. He won because the people of Osun chose him, not because the system favoured him. That is both a blessing and a burden. He must now govern in a manner that justifies the trust reposed in him, knowing that the same people that allowed him to win will be watching his performance closely. His victory was not handed to him; it was earned. And earned victories carry the heaviest responsibility.
The President, for his part, has bought himself something invaluable: credibility. In a single stroke, he demonstrated that his commitment to democratic norms is not merely rhetorical. He showed that he can be trusted to honour the will of the people even when that will contradicts his party’s interest. That is a currency more valuable than any political victory, and he spent it wisely in Osun.
In all of this, let us not allow cynicism to rob us of the ability to recognise genuine progress when we see one. What happened in Osun was progress, however modest. These are not small things in a country where elections have too often been exercises in organised theft. Tinubu has disappointed his critics, and for that, he deserves credit.
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