How Ademola Adeleke Won Osun State Again: Inside the 2026 Governorship Election

Osogbo, Osun State — August 16, 2026

Governor Ademola Adeleke has secured a second full term in office, defeating the All Progressives Congress’s Bola Oyebamiji in a governorship election that INEC formally declared in the early hours of Sunday, following an overnight collation exercise that stretched from roughly 2:00 a.m. to 8:00 a.m.

Contesting this time under the banner of the Accord party rather than his previous platform, the PDP, Adeleke polled 511,067 votes against Oyebamiji’s 444,815 — a winning margin of 66,252 votes, or roughly 6.6 percentage points. It marks the first time Accord has ever won the Osun governorship.

The Headline Numbers

• Total votes cast: 1,005,800 across 3,763 polling units in all 30 Local Government Areas
• Registered voters: 2,339,233 — the highest ever recorded for an Osun governorship poll
• PVC collection rate: 81.5% of registered voters
• Rejected ballots: 20,721 (2.06% of total votes cast)
• Returning Officer: Prof. Joshua Olalekan Ogunwale

How He Actually Won: The Constitutional Mechanics

Nigerian governorship elections require a winning candidate to clear two separate thresholds simultaneously: the highest overall vote total, and at least 25% of the vote in two-thirds of the state’s local government areas. Adeleke didn’t just clear this bar — he cleared it with room to spare.

He carried 19 of Osun’s 30 LGAs to Oyebamiji’s 11, meaning his win rested on genuine geographic spread rather than a lopsided count concentrated in a handful of strongholds.

LGAs won by Adeleke (Accord): Boluwaduro, Ede South, Ede North, Ife North, Ife Central, Ife East, Ilesa West, Ifedayo, Orolu, Osogbo, Oriade, Odo-Otin, Ifelodun, Iwo, Ila, Aiyedire, Egbedore, Ayedaade, Ejigbo

LGAs won by Oyebamiji (APC): Ilesa East, Boripe, Irepodun, Obokun, Atakunmosa West, Irewole, Atakunmosa East, Isokan, Ola Oluwa, Ife South, Olorunda

Adeleke’s strongest numbers came from his home turf and the state’s population centers — Osogbo (36,480 votes), Ede North (35,427), and Ife East (27,201). Oyebamiji’s best showing was in Irewole, where he beat Adeleke roughly three-to-one (29,972 to 10,934), and he also took Olorunda and Ilesa East comfortably. Several LGAs were razor-close: Adeleke edged Boluwaduro by just 68 votes (7,118 to 7,050), while Oyebamiji flipped Isokan by a similarly tight 298-vote margin (14,063 to 13,765).

The Road to the Vote

A few contextual details explain the shape of this contest:

• The vote was postponed a week — originally billed for August 8, INEC pushed the election to August 15.
• PDP and Labour Party sat out — Nigeria’s two other major national parties fielded no candidate in Osun this cycle, effectively narrowing what was nominally a 15-candidate race into a two-horse contest between Adeleke and Oyebamiji.
• Adeleke’s party switch — he defected from the PDP, the party under which he won in 2022, to the Accord party ahead of this election, then defended his seat successfully under the new banner.
• An EFCC account freeze ten days before the vote — the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission froze Osun State government accounts as part of an investigation it has not fully detailed, a development Adeleke’s camp characterized as politically motivated pressure timed to the campaign.
• Heavy security posture — with both the ruling party and APC trading accusations of violence and property destruction in the run-up, police deployed approximately 15,000 personnel and 30 commissioners of police statewide.
• Operational friction on election day — observers reported BVAS accreditation machine malfunctions at multiple polling units causing delays, and at least one documented case of an Accord party member found holding multiple PVCs.

The Longer Arc: Three Elections, One Trajectory

This is Adeleke’s third time contesting — and second time winning — the Osun governorship, and the pattern across the three cycles tells its own story:

In 2018, Adeleke lost by a margin so thin — 532 votes out of a field of 48 candidates — that his camp long maintained he had in fact won and was denied victory. A subsequent tribunal ruling did void a disputed re-run and order APC’s certificate of return withdrawn, though Oyetola ultimately retained the seat through the appellate courts. In 2022, running again, Adeleke defeated Oyetola outright by 28,344 votes and 17 LGAs to 13, and was sworn in as Osun’s sixth elected governor that November.

The 2026 result more than doubles his 2022 winning margin in raw votes and expands his LGA count from 17 to 19 — a trajectory of a steadily consolidating base rather than a single fortunate outcome, and one that held even after he left the party (PDP) under which he’d built that base.

What Comes Next

INEC’s declaration is not necessarily the final word. Osun’s last two governorship cycles were both followed by petitions at the Election Petitions Tribunal, and given the closeness of several individual LGA results, a legal challenge from the APC is a realistic possibility to watch for in the coming weeks. As of this report, no petition had yet been filed.

Figures in this report are drawn from INEC’s official collation as reported by Channels Television, Tribune Online, Legit.ng, Blueprint Newspapers, Dataphyte, and eduweb.ng. Figures from partial or in-progress collation counts have been superseded by the final declared results above.