By: Hon Comrade James Onifade
In the chess game of Osun politics ahead of the 2026 governorship election, the All Progressives Congress (APC) has moved a pawn and called it a queen. The appointment of Hon. Oluwole Oke as Director-General of its campaign committee is not a masterstroke; it is a tell. It exposes panic where there should be planning and noise where there should be structure.
Oke’s recent boast — that the APC are “specialists in removing a sitting governor” and that Governor Ademola Adeleke should “start packing his luggage from the Government House” — belongs to the theatre of old Osun politics, where intimidation passed for strategy. But the electorate has matured. In 2022, they rejected a campaign of federal might and “operation deliver” in favor of a candidate who spoke the language of roads, salaries, and school feeding. They will not be swayed in 2026 by the same empty threats, especially when the messenger has no army behind him.
The arithmetic does not add up
Wole Oke represented Obokun/Oriade Federal Constituency for nearly two decades under the PDP, a run that made him a fixture, not a force. His influence was always transactional, tied to the platform, and never personal. When he finally crossed to the APC, the question that mattered was simple: who followed? The answer, visible to all in Osun East, was nobody. No ward chairmen, no youth blocs, no market associations. Not a single councilor. In Nigerian politics, that is the verdict. You are not a leader if you can not move people; you are only a man with a title.
And what title, exactly, does Oke bring? He has no signature project in his constituency that voters point to with pride. There is no empowerment scheme that outlived his tenure. There was no record of winning a difficult election for anyone but himself, and even that was on the back of the PDP’s machinery. To now position him as the architect to unseat a governor who has paid backlog of salaries, revived rural roads, and maintained a visible, accessible presence across the 30 LGAs, is to confuse familiarity with electability.
The optics are worse than the substance
A campaign DG is the face, the engine room, the coordinator of trust. Yet Oke’s first public reflex has been retreat — the reported locking of his Facebook account to avoid criticism. In an age where governors do live broadcasts from project sites and take questions from artisans, a DG who can not endure comments on his own page is a liability, not a leader. Charity begins at home; if you can not defend your record to your followers, you can not sell a candidate to strangers.
The APC knows this. There are men and women in its Osun fold — former commissioners, technocrats, grassroots mobilisers from Osun Central and West — who have credibility, who have won elections recently, who have not had to defect to be relevant. To overlook them for Oke is not just an oversight; it is an announcement. It tells Osun that the party has run out of credible options and is now scraping the barrel of available defectors.
This is the deeper context the APC ignores at its peril
Osun’s political culture punishes ingratitude. Oke’s entire political biography was written by the PDP: the tickets, the committees, and the relevance. To turn around and lead the charge against that same platform, without bringing a single bloc with him, reads not as courage but as opportunism. Voters in Ilesa, Ijebu-Jesa, and Ibokun remember. They do not reward the man who bites the hand that fed him, especially when he arrives at the new table empty-handed.
Governor Ademola Adeleke, for all the criticisms of style, has governed with a simple, effective formula: be seen, be available, and deliver the basics. Civil servants are paid. Teachers are recalled. Roads are graded. He dances, yes — but he also shows up. That contrast is lethal to a campaign built on bluster. You can not defeat performance with press statements. You can not defeat accessibility with arrogance.
The bottom line is political, not personal
The APC had a chance, at this critical stage, to build a campaign on ideas, on a counter-narrative of governance, on a credible face that could say to Osun: “we have a better alternative.” Instead, it has chosen a political orphan whose only contribution, so far, is noise and a history of shifting allegiances.
Governor Adeleke is not packing any bags. The real packing that needs to happen is the APC’s outdated strategy of recycling defectors with no followership and no substance, and mistaking loudness for leverage.
Osun deserves a contest of records. By choosing Wole Oke, the APC has chosen a sideshow. In 2026, sideshows do not win elections.
E-Signed: Hon Comrade James Onifade
Advocate for Good Governance and A Better Judicial System
