The August 15 governorship election in Osun State has been won and lost, but stakeholders have continued to draw lessons for the 2027 elections from the contest that pitched Governor Ademola Adeleke of Accord against Bola Oyebamiji of the All Progressives Congress (APC). In this report, PHILIP IBITOYE examines the possible lessons for voters, electoral officials, security agencies, and politicians ahead of next year’s elections.
IN the build-up to the just-concluded governorship election in Osun State, all eyes were on the major stakeholders: voters, politicians, security agencies, and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). The widespread belief in political circles was that the election — the last off-cycle poll before 2027 — was the perfect dress rehearsal for what was to come on 16 January 2027, and two weeks later, on 6 February.
Holding about 154 days before the first round of the 2027 general election, even the president, Mr Bola Tinubu, framed it as a predictor of what was to come. In a statement a day before the election, the president said it offered INEC an opportunity to demonstrate its preparedness for the 2027 polls. “INEC must use this last off-cycle election as a test case to demonstrate to Nigerians their full preparedness for the 2027 polls,” he stated.
If the Osun election went well, many political observers thought, the signs were good for 2027. If it went awry, the general election was off to a bad start. With the election of Saturday, August 15, now won and lost, eyes are back on voters, politicians, security agencies, and INEC over what was done right and what went wrong.
Osun, a moderate state in terms of size (though larger than some states in the country), tested the big questions: would voters show up despite pre-election violence and threats? Would money still buy votes? Would INEC’s tech hold under pressure? The answers offer a preview of 2027, when the same questions will play out across 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), and the stakes, and the scrutiny, will be much higher.
Voter resilience carries the day
By most accounts, Osun voters were the most valuable players (MVPs) in the August 15 electoral match, with many stakeholders praising their resilience for what was a largely peaceful and transparent poll. If the pre-election environment in the state was any indicator, a credible poll would have been farfetched. With dozens of residents killed and injured by those loyal to the warring parties, especially the Accord party and All Progressives Congress (APC) over who sits in the Bola Ige House after November 27, 2026, the worst was understandably predicted for the state.
Looking to forestall the trouble that lay ahead, the Federal Government essentially adopted a strategy many observers described as militarisation, deploying more than 15,000 police officers, 10,210 agents of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC), and personnel of other security agencies, including the Department of State Services (DSS), to the state. Even if those security deployments had created a sense of safety, Osun voters were up against a well-oiled political machine that saw several governors under the banner of the ruling APC descending on the state to help their party’s candidate, Bola Oyebamiji, win.
However, several CSOs have praised voters in the state for showing remarkable resilience throughout election day, defying expectations of a poor turnout to go out to vote and protecting their votes. Afrobeats star David Adeleke, better known as Davido, who was backing his uncle and eventual winner of the election, Ademola Adeleke, was particularly vocal on social media, raising awareness of any suspected irregularities.
Many election observers say that the social media attention was key to protecting the votes in Osun. In an interview with Sunday Tribune, the Chairman of BallotEyes and Truth Guard Election Working Group, Abideen Olasupo, said Osun voters refusing to leave until results were counted at the polling unit and uploaded was the practical meaning of “protect your vote”. “That behaviour, which even prominent voices amplified on the day, narrows the space for manipulation because the result is witnessed and documented before it can be altered,” Olasupo said.
YIAGA Africa, which deployed 300 observers and 32 mobile observers across the 30 Local Government Areas (LGAs) for the August 15 poll, in its post-election assessment, also stated that the resilience of voters was the quiet achievement of the contest. “Citizens went to the polls in an environment shaped by the attack on PVC collection centres, politically linked violence, contestation over motor parks, and weeks of inflammatory rhetoric, conditions that Yiaga Africa warned could suppress voter participation. Despite this tension, voters came out regardless,” the organisation said.
Despite the resilience of voters against violent threats and intimidation, observers said voter conduct was not all positive. They report incidents of vote-buying, expressing disapproval of this tactic by political parties to get votes. “Vote-buying was one of the genuine stains on an otherwise improved process, with credible reports of cash inducement at polling units,” Olasupo, whose group deployed 75 observers to different polling units and 30 LGA roving observers on election day, said.
On what needs to change ahead of the 2027 general election, the Executive Director of Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre (CISLAC), Auwal Rafsanjani, warned that voters must realise that selling their votes amounts to telling politicians that they are no longer accountable to the public. He said: “Once they [voters] believe that a particular candidate or party has met their own expectation, they should stand by it and insist they would not collect money to mortgage their mandate. Look, this ₦5,000, ₦10,000 that they are giving them, it’s only once in four years. So, why should you just collect ₦5,000, ₦10,000, and then you continue to suffer bad governance for the next four years?”
Service delivery still matters
If voters get credit for keeping the peace, Governor Adeleke got credit for giving them a reason to show up, according to analysts. Through his first term, Adeleke leaned hard on a service-delivery pitch: new and rehabilitated roads across the state, a minimum wage increase for civil servants, and, crucially, continued salary payments to local government workers even after the Federal Government’s seizure of Osun’s LG allocations over a legal dispute due to the sack of chairmen elected under the Gboyega Oyetola administration. Analysts note that Osun workers who could easily have gone unpaid for months instead kept receiving salaries, and they remembered who made that possible on election day.
Education carried its own weight. The establishment of the University of Ilesa, which had existed largely as a campaign promise under previous administrations, became one of Adeleke’s most tangible wins, and it appears to have paid dividends specifically in the Ilesa zone, where the governor performed strongly.
The lesson for 2027 is that incumbency, used well, is still the most powerful campaign tool in Nigerian politics. Party machinery and the so-called federal might may still have some potency, but Osun suggests that voters are still capable of rewarding demonstrable governance over raw political muscle, a reminder to governors and, eventually, to the president, that the surest path to re-election is still to give people something to point to.
Red flags from INEC
Not everything about August 15 reflected well on the electoral umpire. The most serious concern was the extended outage on the INEC Result Viewing (IReV) portal, which stopped updating for hours in the middle of collation, precisely the window in which rumour and manipulation thrive.
INEC’s official position was that the interruption lasted about two hours, attributing it to connectivity issues and discrepancies flagged by the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BVAS). Dayo Oketola, Chief Press Secretary to the INEC Chairman, Joash Amupitan, said, “When results are uploaded from polling units, connectivity gaps can occur, even in major cities.”
But that account does not fully square with what independent monitors observed. CSOs tracking the portal noted that the last result was uploaded at 8:48 pm before the platform froze and resumed around 11:45 pm. Olasupo, whose BallotEyes group tracked results in real time with Legis360, revealed that observers noticed the freeze was more than two hours and lasted roughly three hours, contrary to INEC’s claim.
“A public results-viewing portal going silent for hours during collation is exactly the window in which suspicion, conspiracy theories and fabricated ‘leaked results’ thrive,” he said, warning that the system malfunctioning at a critical moment erodes trust regardless of the technical explanation.
Olasupo, therefore, called on INEC to stress-test its architecture for all 36 states and the FCT well in advance of the 2027 elections. “Honest real-time communication when systems lag, and full public accounting for every outstanding polling unit are non-negotiable. Technology that only works when it is convenient is not transparent; it is a liability,” he said.
Similarly, Rafsanjani cautioned INEC to take transparency seriously with the knowledge that the commission has “people’s full attention on what they are doing”.
Win-at-all-cost politics was the loser
The clearest, and perhaps most sobering, lesson from Osun is that violence did not decide the outcome. Votes did. In the run-up to August 15, the state recorded a genuinely alarming pattern, witnessing 73 election-related violent incidents and 29 deaths in the months before the poll, with Osogbo alone accounting for 15 of those deaths, according to data compiled monitoring group, Kimpact Development Initiative. Nearly 80 per cent of the incidents occurred between May and July. By any reading, dozens of people lost their lives in a contest that was ultimately settled the way every election is supposed to be settled: by counting ballots. That gap, between what violence promised and what it delivered, is the most damning indictment of Osun’s pre-election period, according to observers.
The most visible flashpoint was Senator Francis Fadahunsi’s viral “kill Accord members” remark, made to APC supporters in his hometown of Ilesa days before the vote. The senator’s media office quickly moved to clarify that he meant defeating the Accord party at the ballot box, not physical violence, insisting the comment was “purely political and metaphorical.”
Whatever the intent behind individual comments, the deaths did not translate into stolen votes, suppressed turnout, or a result decided by force. Voters showed up, stayed to protect their ballots anyway, and the count reflected their choices rather than anyone’s threats. For 2027, when the same dynamics may play out in far more states at once, desperate politicians may want to hold on to the lesson that violence is not enough to help them win.
Will Osun turnout affect 2027?
Nigeria’s turnout in general elections has been on a near-uninterrupted slide since the return to democracy: 52.3 per cent in 1999, a high of 69.1 per cent in 2003, then a steady decline — 57.5 per cent in 2007, 53.7 per cent in 2011, roughly 44 per cent in 2015, about 35 per cent in 2019, and a record low of 26.71 per cent in the 2023 presidential election (governorship turnout that year was similarly depressed, around 31 per cent). Against that backdrop, Osun’s 43 per cent looks like proof that the collapse is not irreversible, but reversing it nationally, across a far more logistically complex and higher-stakes election, is a different order of challenge than sustaining momentum in one state.
But Olasupo cautions against reading too much triumph into Osun. “Osun’s roughly 43% turnout was an improvement on the 27% presidential and 31% governorship figures from 2023, and that is worth acknowledging,” the BallotEyes chairman told Sunday Tribune. “But I want to be honest about what that number hides: analysis of the results shows about 1.3 million registered Osun voters still did not cast a ballot, and turnout remains below the 54% the state recorded in 2014.” By that measure, Osun improved on 2023, but it did not come close to fixing the bigger problem.
Still, there is near-consensus among observers that, given the circumstances, 43 per cent counts as a genuine achievement. CISLAC’s Rafsanjani said the turnout is evidence that resilience is contagious, pointing to Kano in 2023, where voters similarly stood firm against attempts to snatch their mandate, as a precedent for what Osun has now repeated. “It [Osun resilience] will definitely spread to other places so that Nigerians can be happy that what they voted is what is eventually announced,” he said.
On turnout for 2027, Olasupo urged voters not to sit out the election. “When you stay home, you do not remove yourself from the decision, you simply hand it to someone else to make on your behalf,” he said.
Some observers have pointed to structural reform, not just civic mood, as the real lever for turnout in future elections.
Chief among the proposals that civil society and INEC itself pushed for was early or special voting for the more than one million Nigerians — election officials, security personnel, journalists and accredited observers — who are effectively disenfranchised every cycle because their duties keep them away from their registered polling units on voting day.
A related proposal would allow registered voters to cast a ballot at any polling unit nationwide using their PVC, with safeguards ensuring a card can only be used once per election, further widening access for anyone displaced from their registered unit on election day. Neither provision made it into the Electoral Act 2026, which President Tinubu signed in February and which will now govern the 2027 polls, meaning essential workers on election day will, once again, be voting from the sidelines rather than the ballot box.
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