Governor Ademola Adeleke’s grip on Osun State is unravelling, and the pattern is unmistakable because the men who know the state’s political machinery best are abandoning him for both the All Progressives Congress and the African Democratic Congress; in the last quarter alone, five serving federal lawmakers, former aides, and entrenched party chieftains have dumped the PDP and Accord Party to work for the opposition, and when your own senators, representatives, and Governor’s Office staff cross the floor, it is no longer dissent but a verdict on power.
The reported curse hurled at Wole Oke reeks of a governor on a sinking ship, thrashing in panic like a cornered animal that has just sighted mortal danger; when a sitting governor who controls state machinery, federal allocations, and the entire propaganda apparatus of Government House resorts to invoking ancestral wrath against a former ally, it is not strength but the flailing of a man who has lost the argument, the lawmakers, and the towns, and now clings to superstition because projects, patronage, and persuasion have all failed him. Adeleke’s camp understands that Oke’s defection is not just one man leaving but the Ijesa North structure walking away with committee access in Abuja, ward agents on the ground, and the budgetary intelligence that once shielded the PDP, and with Ede’s grip weakening in Ife, Ijesa, Iwo, and the National Assembly, the governor’s response was not a counter-policy or a bridge-building concession but a curse, a desperate incantation meant to frighten others from jumping off a listing vessel. But in Osun politics, curses do not pave roads, do not return senators, and do not stop Iwo’s pillars from staying put in APC; they only confirm to the electorate that the man in the Government House is panting, spent, and out of options, and that the danger he sees is not Wole Oke but the judgment of a state that has watched Ede take everything while the rest of the ship takes water.
.The lack of support from the pillars that control Osun politics is a strong signal that Adeleke’s second term ambition is a mirage. First, in Osun no governor wins without Ife, Ijesa, Osogbo, Iwo, and the federal structure that delivers projects. Unfortunately, those pillars are now filing out of Adeleke’s camp one after another to APC and ADC. Moreover, with the clearest blow coming from Iwo, the headquarters of Osun West, where Barrister Gbadegesin Adedeji, a grassroots party leader with deep ties to transport unions and market associations across Ayedire, Ola-Oluwa, and Iwo LGAs, and Alhaji Liad Tella, a respected elder and mobilizer, have stayed put as the core engine of APC in Iwoland; the governor has lost the ability to call Osun West his base, and when Iwo’s pillars walk, Osun West walks, and when Osun West walks, Adeleke’s path to 2026 collapses.
That assertion hardens when you look at why they left and what replaced them, for the defections are not emotional but structural, and they expose the excesses of the Adeleke family that fractured the coalition of 2022 and provoked a quiet revolt from traditionally superior towns across the state. The first reality Adeleke could not fix is federal isolation, because with APC controlling the presidency and both chambers, PDP lawmakers from Osun found themselves locked out of constituency funding, security coordination, and ministerial lobbying, and men like Wole Oke and Francis Fadahunsi, who spent years in the National Assembly building influence through committees and oversight, understand that staying in opposition at the center means their communities get nothing to commission before 2026; crossing to APC restores access to federal projects that win local elections, and in Osun politics a transformer commissioned in December is worth ten rallies in January, so a rep who cannot bring a classroom block or a borehole loses relevance in his ward regardless of party loyalty.
The second reality is the collapse of state-level patronage, for Adeleke’s administration has been dogged by complaints from PDP ward leaders that appointments, contracts, and empowerment slots are concentrated among family and Ede loyalists, and when Senior Special Assistants like Azeez Kazeem Olatunde and Moyoade Lukman Ayotade defect, it confirms that the reward system inside the Governor’s Office is too narrow to hold a statewide party, because politics here runs on inclusion and the perception of it; men like Olagunsoye Oyinlola, who governed Osun and Lagos and ran PDP’s national secretariat, built his career on balancing Ife, Ijesa, Osogbo, and Ede interests, yet under Adeleke the family excesses became policy, with siblings, cousins, and in-laws visible in contracts, boards, and decision-making, creating the impression that Government House is an Ede annexe rather than a state capital, and the ambition to lift Ede above traditionally superior towns in the state has alienated historic power centers that do not accept subordination; Ife, the cradle of Yoruba royalty, will not queue behind an Ede-centric government that sidelines its chiefs in appointments and projects, and Ijesa leaders who produced governors, ministers, and industrialists view the concentration of influence in one family from one town as a reversal of the balance that kept Osun stable.
The third reality is that the opposition machines are reassembling with institutional memory and federal backing, since Rauf Aregbesola, former governor and Minister of Interior, now National Secretary of ADC, still commands a progressive bloc that never fully disbanded in the wards and local governments, while Iyiola Omisore, former Deputy Governor, Senator, and APC National Secretary, is the architect of Osun’s political mergers who knows how to fuse ACN, CPC, and ANPP remnants into one platform; when Omisore’s APC opens its doors and Aregbesola’s ADC loyalists hold the grassroots, defectors like Oke, Fadahunsi, Adedeji, and Tella are not taking a risk but returning to structures that have won Osun before, with ward chairmen, polling unit agents, and funding channels already in place, and those structures can offer a federal rep or a local leader immediate relevance in Abuja and at home that PDP cannot, especially when the governor’s family is seen as the chief beneficiary of state spending.
Consequently, the arithmetic of power in Osun no longer favours Adeleke, because he has lost two senators, three reps, his Governor’s Office aide, his market affairs aide, the Accord youth structure in Ife, and now the Iwo pillars of Osun West to both APC and ADC, which translates to the loss of Osun East, Osun Central, Ijesa North, Ijesa South, Ife Central, and the headquarters of Osun West, leaving the PDP’s remaining federal presence skeletal and the alliances that gave Adeleke swing votes in 2022 now campaigning for the opposition; Adeleke still has incumbency and the Ede base, but incumbency without federal lawmakers, without his own appointees, and without Ife, Ijesa, and Iwo means he is defending Government House with a fractured party against an opposition that now controls the senate seats, the reps, the federal projects that voters touch, and the Osun West bloc that decides margins.
Oyinlola’s career proves you can govern Osun twice only if you hold Lagos and Abuja connections and a statewide coalition, yet Adeleke now has neither, and the defections are therefore not random but coordinated withdrawals by men who read the field: Oke the economist, Fadahunsi the customs strategist, Adedeji the Osun West financier, Tella the Iwo elder, and the former SSAs who saw the internal memos and the family list; they left because the cost of staying with Adeleke now exceeds the cost of opposing him, and when your senators, reps, aides, and Osun West pillars conclude that the governor cannot protect their interests and that the family excesses have made Ede the sole capital of patronage, the electorate is usually next, so the governor’s fall is not a prediction but a process already in motion, documented by the names of those who walked out, because in Osun power follows structure, and the structure just moved to APC and ADC.
