Governor Ademola Adeleke has just pulled off a major victory in the Osun state governorship election, securing a second term on the platform of the Accord Party. But while his supporters are busy popping bottles, the party that gave him the ticket is tearing itself apart from the inside.
Mr Adeleke cruised to victory by pulling in 511,067 votes to defeat Bola Oyebamiji of the All Progressives Congress, who managed 444,815 votes. Yet, the real drama isn't even about the votes cast at the polling units. It's about who actually owns the political machinery the governor just used.
Days before voters stepped out to pick their next leader, Christopher Imumolen, who claims to lead a faction of the Accord Party, threw a massive wrench into the campaign. He showed up at an APC campaign rally in Osogbo to announce that his camp was withdrawing all support for Mr Adeleke and backing the opposition instead. It looked like the governor had been abandoned by his own landlords right before the exam.
The Osun election is an election. The Accord leadership dispute is a national party and legal matter. They're two different issues.
Another camp within the party wasn't having any of it. Maxwell Mgbudem, heading a rival faction, immediately jumped on radio and television to declare that Mr Imumolen had been stripped of his powers and didn't have any authority to speak for the platform. The Independent National Electoral Commission and the main national working committee backed Mr Mgbudem up, recognizing his structure as the legitimate one.
Now that the votes have been counted and the certificate of return is practically in sight, the losing faction within the party is refusing to stand down. Mr Imumolen called a press conference in Abuja to state clearly that winning a governorship election doesn't settle who holds the national chairmanship of a political party.
This bitter family feud didn't just drop out of the sky. The bad blood between the Imumolen and Mgbudem camps goes back to the controversial 2024 national convention that split the party into warring halves. Matters got so messy that an Abuja High Court briefly ordered INEC to recognize Mr Imumolen as national chairman while a bigger lawsuit crawled through the system.
Not long after that court order, the Mgbudem-led executive committee hit back by kicking Mr Imumolen and his loyalists out of the party entirely, accusing them of anti-party activities and gross misconduct. That expulsion didn't stop the fights from spilling straight into the Osun primaries, where rival camps tried every trick in the book to hijack the candidate selection process.
Mr Adeleke managed to navigate this minefield, use the Mgbudem-backed structure to run his campaign, and cross the finish line first. But with fresh threats of court battles flying around, the governor's second term is starting off with a legal shadow hanging over his political vehicle.