At about two o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 16 August 2026, the collation of the Osun governorship election was still unfinished. The Independent National Electoral Commission had made no return. In law, nothing had been settled. At that hour a telephone rang in Osogbo, and the caller was the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
The man he was calling was Ademola Adeleke of the Accord Party not his party’s candidate, but the man who had just beaten his party’s candidate. He did not call to complain. He did not call to warn, or to sound anybody out, or to propose terms. He called to congratulate. “The people of Osun have spoken,” he was reported as saying. “Their will must prevail.”
Four of those words are the reason for this article.
The formal declaration came a few hours later. The State Returning Officer, Professor Joshua Olalekan Ogunwole, Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, announced that Adeleke had polled 511,067 votes and Asiwaju Munirudeen Bola Oyebamiji of the All Progressives Congress 444,815, with Dr Najeem Salaam of the African Democratic Congress third on 17,180. The margin was 66,252 votes. The local government areas divided nineteen to eleven.
Nobody should mistake that for a walkover. Adeleke built his cushion in Ede North, where he took 35,427 votes to 10,283, and in Osogbo, Iwo and Ife East. The APC hit back hard in Irewole, where Oyebamiji polled 29,972 to Adeleke’s 10,934, and held Olorunda, Boripe, Ilesa East and Obokun. Both parties left the field with something to show for it. Only one left with the certificate of return.
But the arithmetic is the ordinary business of an election. What deserves comment is not what happened in Osogbo that night. It is what did not.
No injunction appeared at midnight to restrain the Commission from making a return. No “security report” was suddenly discovered, requiring collation to be halted until tempers cooled. Nobody in uniform walked into the collation centre. The election was not declared inconclusive on a ground invented after the votes had been counted. No federal agency descended on the state in the hours between the counting and the declaration.
And there was no silence from Abuja that particular, studied silence by which a defeated ruling party lets its lawyers and its agents know that a result is to be treated as merely provisional. Any Nigerian who has followed an election in this country knows that script by heart. It was not performed.
Section 14(2)(a) of the Constitution provides that sovereignty belongs to the people of Nigeria, from whom government through this Constitution derives all its powers and authority. We quote that provision easily and obey it selectively. It costs nothing when the people vote for you. Its entire meaning lies in what is done on the morning they vote against you.
On 15 August the people of Osun voted against the party in power at the centre. The President leads that party. The candidate they rejected was his own, in a state in his own political region, in the last major off-cycle governorship election before 2027. The margin sat in the dangerous middle: wide enough to be real, narrow enough that a determined man might have persuaded himself it could be reduced. Every calculation of party advantage pointed one way. The President went the other way.
I should declare an interest in being wrong. In the weeks before the poll I said publicly that I was uneasy about the atmosphere in which Osun would vote: … No Debit restriction placed on the statutory allocation account of the state, the presidential directive that followed it, and the prospect of a state policed rather than served on election day. Those concerns were honestly held, and some of them remain. But a commentator who raises an alarm owes the public a second broadcast when the fire does not come. The machinery many of us feared would be turned on the voters of Osun was not turned on them.
Adeleke won an election. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu won something that cannot be counted at a collation centre and does not expire in four years. He won, for the Nigerian electoral process, the presumption of legitimacy.
No electoral commission can manufacture that presumption. Winners cannot supply it either; every winner finds his own election credible. It is supplied by the loser, and it is worth most when the loser is the one holding the instruments of coercion. When such a man says of a result that went against him that their will must prevail, he gives the process an authority that no amount of technology, funding or fresh legislation could have bought for it. Consent from the defeated is the true currency of constitutional government. Everything else is arithmetic.
Nigerians of a certain age do not need to be told what the other road looks like. We watched a mandate freely given taken back in 1993, and we are still paying for it. And we remember 31 March 2015, when a sitting President picked up a telephone before the final declaration and told this country, in effect, that no ambition of his was worth its blood. That call has outlived his policies. It is the thing he is thanked for.
One act, however fine, is an incident. It becomes a legacy only when it hardens into habit, and it hardens into habit only when it survives the occasion on which obedience is genuinely expensive. Osun cost the President something. It was not the largest bill he will be asked to pay.
The examinations that remain are of a different order: the bye-elections and the party primaries, where malpractice is cheapest because nobody is watching; the National Assembly contests; and, above all, the presidential ballot of 2027, on which the President’s own name will appear. Generosity with another man’s office is admirable. What history will want to know is what a man does about his own.
If Osun is to become a standard rather than an anecdote, some things must follow from it. The Commission must be funded fully, funded early, and then left alone. Interference is not always dramatic; a late release of funds can do what an armed man in a collation centre does, and attract no headline.
The conduct of federal enforcement and regulatory agencies during an electoral period should be governed by a published protocol, so that the extraordinary powers of the state are never available — and never suspected of being available as instruments of partisan advantage. What was withheld in Osun by one man’s forbearance ought henceforth to be withheld by rule.
Security at the polling unit exists for the voter and for nobody else. The soldier and the policeman are there so that an old woman can queue without fear, not so that the presence of the state can be impressed upon her.
And defeat must be accepted wherever it occurs, not merely where it is too large to be argued with. It is easy to concede a governorship lost by 66,252 votes. The test is the ward or the council seat lost by two hundred, and the discipline of leaving it lost rather than reaching for the courtroom.
Honours in political life are ordinarily conferred by communiqué, bought by advertisement, or awarded by the beneficiaries of the man being honoured. The title contemplated here cannot be obtained by any of those routes. “Champion of democracy” is a verdict rather than a citation, and it is delivered late by historians, and by the memory of ordinary people who stood in the sun to vote and found afterwards that their standing there had meant something.
In Osun, the President did the thing that earns that verdict. He allowed the people to defeat him, and then told the country that their defeat of him was to stand. If he does it again in the bye-elections, again in the legislative contests, and again in 2027, then nothing his administration achieves in infrastructure, in revenue or in reform will stand higher, and the whole of it will be summed up in one line: he inherited a democracy in which power was taken, and left one in which power was given.
That is the trophy. It is still on the table. The elections that remain will decide whether it is collected.
Dr Wahab Shittu, SAN, is a lecturer at the Faculty of Law, University of Lagos, and writes from Lagos.
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