The road to Osun 2026 is already drawn on the walls of the All Progressives Congress, and one line is written in red ink: going into that election without Senator Iyiola Omisore is not a bold strategy but a suicide mission, because the party would be choosing to fight Governor Ademola Adeleke with one hand tied, an empty war chest, and no bridge into the very territory that decides Osun elections
The above view may not be farfetched. Politics in Osun has never been for the faint-hearted, and the next electoral cycle is already exposing the fault lines inside the All Progressives Congress, because the loudest silence in the party today is the one around Senator Iyiola Omisore, a man who carries structure, money, and street-level power in a state where elections are won in wards, not on Twitter. Yet whispers from the APC camp suggest a dangerous gamble: sideline Omisore based on uncertain internal calculations that the party can manufacture victory over Governor Ademola Adeleke without him, and that temptation is beginning to look less like strategy and more like a suicide mission.
The irony is hard to miss, since the same APC that lost Osun in 2022 to the “dancing governor” now appears willing to repeat the mistake of underestimating both Adeleke’s retail politics and Omisore’s machine, because Adeleke did not win by accident but by coalition-building, populist appeal, and a ground game that exploited APC’s factional wounds, and Omisore understands those wounds intimately, having been deputy governor, a senator, and a governorship candidate who pulled 128,000+ votes in 2018 before his SDP alliance helped APC snatch victory from PDP in the rerun. Consequently, ignoring the one figure who can unite Ife, fund logistics in 30 LGAs, and speak the language of the party’s aggrieved grassroots is not discipline, it is denial.
Moreover, APC’s current arithmetic rests on shaky pillars, because the assumption that federal might, incumbency at the center, and a divided opposition will deliver Osun overlooks two realities: first, Adeleke has spent two years embedding himself through salary payments, infrastructure optics, and a brand of accessibility that plays well against the “Abuja party” label, and second, APC in Osun is not a monolith but a collection of camps still bruised from the Oyetola-Omisore-Aregbesola cold war, so without a unifier who brings his own structure, the party risks going into battle with a fragmented army and no war chest. Omisore represents both, since his financial muscle can oil a campaign that PDP will undoubtedly fund heavily, and his Ife base denies Adeleke a clean sweep of the Osun East senatorial district, which is critical to any governorship math.
Although Omisore’s history with the party is complicated, and his ambitions have previously clashed with those of other gladiators, yet that is precisely why he matters, since elections in Osun are not won by saints but by strategists who know where the votes sleep, and right now the votes are sleeping in places where Omisore has keys. Therefore, when APC leaders calculate that they can isolate him to appease newer entrants or to satisfy Abuja’s preference for “fresh faces,” they are mistaking optics for organization, and in Osun, organization beats billboards.
The danger for APC is that Adeleke needs Omisore more as an outsider than as an opponent, because a sidelined Omisore becomes a joker in Adeleke’s deck, either as a quiet sympathizer, a third-force disruptor, or simply a demobilized bloc that refuses to work, and any of those scenarios tightens PDP’s path to 2026, while APC’s uncertain calculation of victory without a solid Ife-Eastern flank begins to look like a memo written by people who have not counted ward results at 2 a.m. In that sense, the temptation to ignore the man with structure, money, and power is not just risky but self-defeating, since it hands Adeleke the one thing an incumbent loves: a divided, underfunded opposition that fights itself before it fights him.
Ultimately, APC’s Osun project will rise or fall on whether it learns from 2022, because that loss was not just about Adeleke’s dance but about APC’s discord, and lightning in Nigerian politics tends to strike the same place twice when the ground is still wet. Omisore may be an uncomfortable ally, but in the calculus of Osun, comfort has never won elections; capacity has, and if APC chooses ego over structure and speculation over spreadsheets, it won’t be Adeleke who defeats them in 2026, it will be their own suicide note, signed long before the ballots are printed.
Why Sidelining the Osun Power Broker Is Political Self-Harm
The crisis between Senator Iyiola Omisore and the All Progressives Congress has moved from whispers to open wounds, and a dispassionate look at the sequence of events makes one judgment hard to avoid: Omisore has been unfairly treated, publicly embarrassed, and the party cannot win Osun 2026 without a diplomatic rapprochement. The facts of his contribution, the manner of his isolation, and the electoral cost of alienating him all point to the same conclusion.
To understand the fallout, rewind to 2018, because that was the year Omisore proved his structural worth, when he ran under the SDP and polled 128,049 votes, becoming the kingmaker in a race PDP was coasting to win, and his decision to align with APC in the rerun handed Gboyega Oyetola the governorship by 482 votes. That single act rewrote Osun politics, yet it also created a debt the party has been reluctant to acknowledge in public. Omisore was later compensated with the National Secretary position in 2022, but the role quickly became a gilded cage, since he was saddled with the fallout of the Adamu-led NWC, blamed for poor primary management across states he did not control, and ultimately sacrificed in July 2023 when the party needed a scapegoat to reset ahead of the general elections. The resignation was framed as voluntary, but the choreography was public humiliation, with leaks, caucus briefings, and a narrative that hung the post-2023 electoral losses around his neck while more powerful actors walked free.
Since then, the embarrassment has been systematic, because Omisore has been excluded from key Osun APC reconciliation meetings, his loyalists have been stripped of board appointments, and the party’s emerging 2026 machinery in the state is being built around parallel structures in Ilesa and Osogbo that deliberately bypass Ife, his strongest base. The message is not subtle: the party wants his network without his face, his money without his mouth, his votes without his veto. That is textbook unfair treatment, since no other former National Secretary with his electoral footprint has been so comprehensively frozen out 18 months after leaving office, and certainly not one who delivered a swing state on a 482-vote margin.
The unfairness is compounded by the political risk, because Osun APC is not negotiating from strength, as it lost the governorship in 2022, lost all three senatorial seats in 2023, and lost 9 of 9 House of Reps seats, leaving the party with zero federal legislative leverage in the state. In that context, sidelining the one figure who can fund a statewide campaign, reopen Ife, and unify the Aregbesola-Oyetola feud is not party discipline but electoral malpractice. Adeleke’s PDP knows this, which is why the governor’s camp has made discreet overtures to Omisore’s allies, calculating that a neutralized Omisore is worth 60,000 votes off APC’s total, and an angry Omisore is worth 100,000 votes added to PDP through anti-party work or a third-force nuisance.
Omisore’s ballot-box value is realer, and a party that claims to be serious about reclaiming Osun cannot simultaneously preach “party supremacy” while practicing selective amnesia about who kept them in power between 2018 and 2022. Therefore, the path forward is not another press statement denying a rift but deliberate diplomatic appeasement, because the crisis is no longer about ego but arithmetic. Appeasement here means three things: first, public acknowledgment of his 2018 role and restitution for the manner of his NWC exit, since politics is perception and humiliation without closure breeds permanent enemies; second, integration of his structure into the 2026 campaign council with a clear deliverable, not a ceremonial title, so that Ife, Ijesa-South, and key LGAs are not conceded to PDP by default; third, a federal concession that signals respect, whether through board appointments for his core loyalists or a role that allows him to deploy his financial war chest without suspicion.
The judgment is blunt: APC did not just sideline Omisore, it embarrassed a man who once saved it, and it did so at a time when it has no other proven path to 56% in Osun. If the party continues to treat structure like a sin and money like a threat, it will discover in 2026 that Adeleke’s dance was the least of its problems. You don’t win swing states by alienating swingmakers, and Omisore, for all his flaws, is still the biggest swingmaker in Osun.
Appease him diplomatically now, or explain to Abuja later why a state you won by 482 votes in 2018 was lost by 80,000 in 2026.
