2027: Adeleke vs Oyetola – can arch rivals put aside their feud to get Tinubu reelected?

The rivalry between Governor Ademola Adeleke and his predecessor, minister Gboyega Oyetola, dates back to 2018 and has been marked by deadly violence over three governorship election cycles in Osun State in southwestern Nigeria, with dozens of supporters killed on both sides.

The violence continues, as police confirmed 30 deaths leading up to the governorship election in August, with several more people killed afterwards.

On paper, the 15 August contest pitted Adeleke, the Accord candidate, against Bola Oyebamiji of the All Progressives Congress (APC). In reality, Oyetola was seeking to reclaim, through his protégé, the governorship he lost to Adeleke in 2022.

Now a federal minister, Oyetola had Tinubu’s backing and the national APC machinery behind his candidate. But Adeleke won again, this time by an even wider margin.

The bitterness has hardly subsided. But Tinubu has now replaced Oyetola with Adeleke as the Osun coordinator of his 2027 reelection campaign, putting the two rivals in the awkward position of working towards the same goal.

A strategic shift

In the initial APC presidential campaign council list released in late August, Oyetola, as the party’s leader in Osun, was named state coordinator. But a revised list unveiled in mid-October reassigned him to serve as deputy to former Lagos governor Babatunde Fashola, the campaign’s South West zonal coordinator.

His former position went to Adeleke, who has pledged to support Tinubu’s reelection despite belonging to the opposition Accord party.

The reshuffle appears designed to give Adeleke a free hand in Osun, with none of Oyetola’s loyalists assigned a role in the state campaign.

Adeleke’s camp sees the reshuffle as proof that Tinubu values the governor more than Oyetola, who is the president’s nephew.

“It is clear that Adeleke is the most popular politician in Osun State today,” the governor’s aide, Jamiu Olawumi, tells The Africa Report, citing his repeated victories over Oyetola in past elections.

“It is not a mistake on Tinubu’s part to ask him to coordinate Osun State for him. The president considers Adeleke more important than Oyetola in Osun. God has placed Adeleke over him and his camp.”

Osun APC spokesman Kola Olabisi dismisses that interpretation as illogical, noting that it is not clear which is higher: the responsibility of overseeing a campaign in the state versus the responsibility of overseeing an entire zone or region.

I doubt if Adeleke will dare come out fully to campaign for Tinubu

For Sunday Ogunro, an Osun-based journalist and political analyst, Olabisi’s response betrays the frustration within the state APC over Tinubu’s decision to hand Adeleke control of the campaign.

“Osun APC members are angry with Tinubu’s appointment of Adeleke,” Ogunro tells The Africa Report. “But they are afraid of Tinubu. They know that Tinubu has invested in them, but they have failed to deliver. They are seriously displeased that Tinubu wrote them off, that they lack the capacity to deliver the state.”

A nightmare come true?

Oyetola had long sought to prevent the very arrangement now taking shape in Osun. Amid a wave of defections by opposition governors to the APC in 2025, Adeleke explored joining the ruling party from from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to strengthen his chances of reelection. He enlisted his billionaire elder brother, Adedeji Adeleke, to approach Tinubu. The president welcomed the prospect, but Oyetola resisted.

According to insiders, Oyetola argued the APC did not need Adeleke to deliver Osun for Tinubu in 2027. Instead, he wanted the party to oust Adeleke from the governorship.

Olabisi insists the Osun APC welcomes any arrangement that would secure Tinubu’s reelection. That, however, does not make Adeleke “a friend of the house”.

Adeleke’s aide, Olawumi, says the governor does not consider the Osun APC a friendly camp either, recalling what his loyalists suffered at the hands of the APC machinery during the governorship election.

“They (APC) remanded over 89 members of our party,” he says. “We went through that election under repression. We won because the people firmly resisted them and returned Adeleke.”

The complication of Adeleke’s new role

Ogunro says many people in Osun are disappointed that Adeleke went back to Tinubu, after helping him resist the APC’s desperate measures to take the state in August.

“Adeleke is putting himself in trouble with his friendship with Tinubu,” Ogunro says. “I foresee voter apathy in the presidential election.”

The convener of the Centre for Good Governance, Wole Oladapo, says Adeleke’s decision to work for Tinubu confirms that the people will always be a pawn in politicians’ games.

“Politicians are not emotional beings; they only focus on their interests. Adeleke does not love anybody; he loves himself,” he says, adding that this decision is political survival.

One factor is the protracted battle between Adeleke’s government and the APC over control of local government councils, a crisis that led Tinubu’s government to withhold the state’s council allocations.

Another is the multiple court cases over Accord’s national leadership, which risk invalidating the ticket Adeleke used to win reelection in August.

“The matters may eventually end up at the Supreme Court. Expectedly, the man feels that being with the president, who may have the capacity to influence things at the Supreme Court, means he needs to be courted,” Oladapo says.

“I doubt if Adeleke will dare come out fully to campaign for Tinubu,” he says. “It may prove difficult to convince many of his supporters to campaign for Tinubu. It will negatively affect Accord candidates in other elections. They are conscious of that situation.”

(The Africa Report)