President Bola Tinubu personally telephoned Governor Ademola Adeleke of Osun State to congratulate him on his re-election victory — a notable gesture from the leader of the opposition APC to a sitting PDP governor, according to Premium Times. Adeleke publicly disclosed the call and used it as leverage, saying he expects his APC challenger, Kola Oyebamiji, to follow the president's lead and accept the outcome.
Adeleke framed the result as a direct endorsement of his administration's record in office, describing the vote as a mandate renewed by Osun residents who had assessed his first term in full. He did not detail specific policy achievements in the remarks reported by Premium Times, but the framing — performance vindicated at the ballot — is politically significant ahead of broader intra-party positioning within the PDP.
From the opposition benches, the congratulations arrived in force. Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Labour Party's 2023 presidential candidate Peter Obi, New Nigeria Peoples Party leader Rabiu Kwankwaso, and former Senate President Bukola Saraki all issued statements recognising Adeleke's victory, Premium Times reported. All four urged the governor to use the renewed mandate to deliver tangible improvements for Osun residents.
The breadth of that opposition chorus is itself a political data point. Atiku, Obi, and Kwankwaso ran against each other — and against Tinubu — in the bitterly contested 2023 presidential election, and their camps have remained fractious. That all three, alongside Saraki, issued congratulatory statements within the same news cycle suggests a shared interest in signalling that democratic norms — winner acknowledged, loser expected to concede — hold even when a PDP governor holds the seat.
The Osun governorship has a turbulent electoral history that makes this re-election notable. Adeleke first won the seat in July 2022, defeating incumbent APC governor Gboyega Oyetola in an election that went to the Supreme Court before Adeleke was finally confirmed. His re-election, if it stands without a prolonged legal challenge, would represent the first time in recent Osun political history that a governor secures a second consecutive term without the result being fundamentally contested at tribunal level through to finality before the next cycle begins.
Oyebamiji's silence is therefore being watched closely. Adeleke's public call for the APC candidate to concede — citing Tinubu's own congratulatory call as the benchmark — puts Oyebamiji in an awkward position. Challenging the result in court is a constitutional right, but doing so after the sitting president has already phoned his congratulations to the winner narrows the political space for that challenge to be received as anything other than a rearguard action.
For Nigeria's political economy, Osun's electoral outcome carries a small but real signal about APC's grip on the South-West. Osun sits within the region that is Tinubu's political base, and the party had won — and previously retained — the state. The PDP holding it through a re-election, despite a well-funded APC campaign, suggests the incumbent advantage of delivering visible governance is beginning to reassert itself in a zone where the APC has treated presidential patronage as a substitute for state-level delivery.
National opposition figures congratulating Adeleke also feeds into the longer arithmetic of 2027. Atiku and Obi are each likely to contest the presidency again, and both need to demonstrate they can mobilise goodwill in states where PDP governors hold power. A public show of solidarity with Adeleke now costs nothing and builds a small credit in a state that will matter for delegate counts and primary politics within whatever coalition emerges.
Why it matters: Tinubu's congratulatory call — confirmed publicly by Adeleke — effectively closes the space for a party-backed rejection of the Osun result, making this one of the cleaner gubernatorial handovers in the state's recent history and offering a template for how incumbent performance, not just federal patronage, can decide a South-West election.