34 days to guber poll: Simmering crisis burning APC from within remains, despite assurances

34 days to guber poll: Simmering crisis burning APC from within remains, despite assurances…

Philip Ibitoye
July 12, 2026

As political violence rocks Osun State ahead of the August 15 governorship election, a deeper crisis is quietly tearing the All Progressives Congress (APC) apart from within as a wave of defections traced back to a bitterly contested December primary bleeds its ranks. PHILIP IBITOYE reports on the grievances driving members into Governor Adeleke’s camp and whether the opposition can still mount a fight it may already be losing.

ON Friday, July 3, 2026, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Tunji Disu, landed in Osun State to quell a spate of violent clashes between supporters of the ruling Accord party and the All Progressives Congress (APC) ahead of the August 15 governorship election. He vowed harsh consequences for further bloodshed. But the violence on Osun’s streets is only the visible half of a war the APC is fighting. The quieter, more consequential battle is happening inside the party itself and, by most accounts, the APC is losing it to itself before it even faces Adeleke at the polls.

Since Adeleke unseated the incumbent APC candidate in 2022, the erstwhile ruling party had been scheming its revenge. But internal schisms and a mounting exodus of members are dimming those chances as Adeleke seeks a second term, several insiders told Sunday Tribune.

When the governor kicked off his re-election campaign on Tuesday, June 16, he was joined by dozens of defectors, many of them influential lieutenants and former political officeholders from the camp of former APC governorship aspirant, Senator Iyiola Omisore, who were with the party in its successful 2018 campaign and failed 2022 bid. Many of them, including Commissioner for Education under the Oyetola administration, Folorunso Bamisayemi; former Commissioner for Political Affairs and Intergovernmental Relations, Taiwo Akeju; and former Special Adviser on Higher Education, Jamiu Olawumi, have renounced their past criticisms of Adeleke and cast the governor as the best choice in the upcoming election.

“Adeleke will win the election, and we will work for his re-election. Adeleke has done well throughout the state. In Osogbo, Ila, Iwo, Ile-Ife, Ilesa and others. You have done well, you deserve a second term,” Bamisayemi said at the campaign rally.

In interviews with Sunday Tribune, various defectors gave multiple reasons for leaving the APC for the Accord party. However, most cited the circumstances surrounding the party’s primary election in December as the beginning of the crisis that crescendoed into the mass exodus of dissatisfied members from the party more than six months later. Some noted that, while they decided to stay on after the problematic primary election process, the party leadership continued to run a non-inclusive platform that was not loyal to them and did not care about their contributions, eventually pushing them out the door.

Genesis of the crisis
The seeds of Osun APC’s unravelling were sown on a Friday afternoon in December 2025, when a seven-member screening committee, chaired by Obinna Uzor, threw out seven of the party’s nine governorship aspirants, among them Omisore, a two-time governorship candidate and the party’s former National Secretary.

The panel’s official reasoning — that the disqualified men failed to meet a nominator threshold under Articles 9.3(i) and 31.2(ii) of the APC constitution — struck many within the party as a technicality weaponised to clear the field for Bola Oyebamiji, the eventual “consensus” candidate who emerged by affirmation rather than contest.

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What should have been an internal procedural dispute instead became the founding grievance of a slow-building revolt. Omisore and his co-aspirants publicly branded the process a “hatchet job,” alleging that the screening chairman personally informed aspirants that certain figures “from the Villa” engineered the