How not to read Governor Adeleke’s victory, by Rotimi Fasan

Otherwise, both President Bola Tinubu and Governor Ademola Adeleke are at peace and reached a rapprochement, away from the political distance that resulted in the former’s loss of the state in the 2023 election, several months back.

It is important for those latter-day pundits and social media activists, including opponents of the APC and President Bola Tinubu, looking at Osun state politics from outside to understand this backstory and the subtext to Governor Ademola Adeleke’s reelection victory before reading both their prejudices and wishful thinking into it and thereby ascribing unfounded conspiracy theories, locker-room gossip and inflated meanings to the entire process.

Anyone thinking otherwise, including a former president who publicly renounced his membership of the political party that gave him a chance to be president twice after a three-year spell as a military dictator, by tearing his membership card to shreds — the apparently retired but not tired politician who showed up unannounced at Governor Adeleke’s doorstep holding hands like long-lost lovers and dancing merengue with the governor just hours after he was declared victorious — that president was simply on a failed mission to persuade a politician who has not only been converted to, but was only denied membership confirmation of, the APC by the same Osun APC people who sought to deny him a second term as governor.