There are reasons politically motivated explanations dressed in anti-graft garb don’t fly. The public can see through pretended patriotism. That is why the EFCC operative explaining the seizure of an Osun State account without a court order this week may as well have been addressing corpses. Speaking on Arise TV, the operative drew attention to the commission’s similar action in Edo State under Godwin Obaseki, an opposition governor like Adeleke, but would not specify exactly how many days before the election. He did not indicate that similar monitoring was done in Ekiti State, where the APC’s Biodun Oyebanji won re-election in June. You see, there will always be plenty of arguments when politicians and institutions go rogue. When Muhammadu Buhari, as sitting president, illegally removed CJN Onnoghen close to the 2019 elections in which he was a candidate, he offered plenty of talk about corruption and legality, yet it was all demonic pretence. Buhari used the Code of Conduct Tribunal to execute his coup against law and logic – an impeachable offence – and got away with it. We’ve travelled this dirty road many times.
The detention of the Osun SSG, addressed on this page last week, was only the culmination of a series of repressive actions taken by the Federal Government against Governor Ademola Adeleke and the people he governs. For four years now, the Federal Government has dropped all pretence and played perverse politics with the future of Osun State, just as it has done with Rivers State, where a demonic, insufferably arrogant presidential aide is playing Pontifex Maximus.
Nothing illustrates the sad state of affairs in the State of the Living Spring like the seizure of LG funds and their payment to unelected impostors. Since February 2025, the Federal Government has withheld statutory allocations to Osun State’s 30 LGs, based on a perverse interpretation of a Court of Appeal judgment of February 10, 2025, which dismissed the PDP’s challenge to the October 2022 LG elections held under Governor Gboyega Oyetola. The APC interpreted this as a reinstatement of its sacked chairmen and councillors, and attempts by those sacked officials to resume office led to violence and bloodshed. Here’s the gist of the case. In October 2022, the APC won LG elections boycotted by other parties. The PDP and APP challenged this in court, and in November 2022, a Federal High Court in Osogbo nullified the elections and sacked the officials. The APC appealed the APP case but did nothing for two years, forcing the Court of Appeal to strike out its case. Then in February 2025, the Adeleke administration conducted fresh LG elections based on the subsisting judgment and a state High Court order. On June 13, 2025, the Court of Appeal dismissed the APC’s application to relist the abandoned appeal, calling its action a ‘self-inflicted injury.’ It upheld the 2022 nullification.
Curiously, AGF Lateef Fagbemi, SAN, insisted on recognizing the sacked APC officials, citing the February 10 judgment, which did not in any way restore them to office. Consequently, in a June 10, 2025 letter, the Office of the Accountant General directed the sacked LG chairmen, treasurers, or directors of finance to open CBN accounts, thus bypassing signatory requirements. The same government that rushed to comply with the Supreme Court judgment on Rivers LG elections ignored the Osun judgment, leaving LG workers in limbo.
Pitted against the facts of history, the irony couldn’t be more delicious. In 2005, following the FG’s seizure of Lagos LG funds, the then governor, Bola Tinubu, lashed President Olusegun Obasanjo, accusing the Owu-born general of deliberately violating the Constitution and using federal power to punish political opponents. His words brimmed with fire: ‘What you are doing is the politics of genocide, to destabilise the state, punish the opposition, and make the people suffer.’ He also told Obasanjo that the government must be ‘religiously dedicated to the true practice of federalism.’
But now, Tinubu’s FG is doing to Osun State worse than Obasanjo ever did to Lagos. According to the Osun State House of Assembly, the court-sacked APC LG chairmen got ?130 billion as the FG released withheld allocations into special accounts operated by them. The Assembly Speaker, Adewale Egbedun, said the lawmakers discovered ‘systematic illegal disbursement’ of LG funds. He said: ‘N25m was paid to each of the 30 LG chairmen, N12m to each vice chairman, N10m to each of the 332 APC councillors, N130m to selected traditional rulers, and N13bn in legal fees.’ In response, the state government secured restraining orders from an Oyo State High Court to freeze the accounts.
Then came the issue of the transport union, NURTW. Backed by federal power, the union, a potent factor in elections, has been breathing down the neck of the Osun State Government. Musiliu Akinsanya, a national president of the union sacked by the Court of Appeal but clinging to power by other means, says the union is a nationally registered body established under federal law and that no state governor has the legal authority to suspend its operations. He did not make this argument when the Lagos State government banned NURTW operations in its parks and made him chairman of an alternative body, the Lagos Parks Management Committee, following his suspension by the national body for insubordination in 2022. Oluomo has inaugurated a caretaker committee for the Osun chapter in an attempt to override Governor Ademola Adeleke’s suspension of NURTW activities in motor parks across the state after violent clashes involving rival factions of the union. With their partisan alignment with the sacked APC officials, control of LG funds as leverage, insubordination to a Court of Appeal judgment that favoured the current Osun State government, and attempted hijack of motor parks, the federal authorities have made no secret of their desire to add Osun State to their list of conquered territories. But they will ultimately face the judgment of an eagle-eyed populace alarmed by their expansionist tactics.
The FG apparently has awesome powers, and has been deploying them to take down the government of Osun State. It didn’t matter that the governor actually tried to join the president’s party but was rebuffed, and has openly endorsed the president for the 2027 polls despite contesting re-election on an opposition platform – a platform he was forced to embrace after presidential moles hijacked his party, the PDP, in order to give him (the president) absolute control of the political stakes ahead of the general election. The undertaker, the trash-talking individual intent on putting the people of the oil-rich Rivers State in his pocket, is busy celebrating state capture without the slightest shred of decency.
Years before taking office, US President James Madison wrote in The Federalist: ‘The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands… may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.’ The Bard of Avon had the same concern with the dangers of tyranny. With the dark underbelly of politics in England in the back of his mind, the Bard declared in a tone laced with palpable distress in Measure for Measure: ‘O, it is excellent to have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous to use it like a giant.’ The FG, which has approached the people of Osun State with absolute contempt while wielding the enormous powers at its disposal, should not cry when the people reaffirm Adeleke’s mandate next week.