By Gharny Yeku
The Osun governorship election has come and gone, but the arguments surrounding it may tell us more about the state of our democracy than the result itself. There is a peculiar sickness in Nigeria’s democratic culture that deserves more attention than the usual arguments about rigging, vote buying, electoral violence, and the credibility of INEC. It is the hypocrisy with which so many of us approach elections: democracy gets celebrated when our preferred candidate wins, and suddenly declared dead the moment the same process produces a result we dislike.
The just-concluded Osun State governorship election has exposed that contradiction all over again.
On August 15, 2026, voters across the state’s 30 local government areas went to the polls to decide who would govern Osun for the next four years. INEC declared the incumbent, Ademola Adeleke of the Accord Party, the winner with 511,067 votes. His closest challenger, the APC’s Bola Oyebamiji, polled 444,815, while the ADC’s Najeem Salaam finished a distant third with 17,180.
That margin is significant. It is also exactly where the real conversation should begin, not because Adeleke won, not because Oyebamiji lost, and not because one camp deserves celebration while the other deserves ridicule, but because Osun has again handed Nigerians a chance to examine what we actually mean when we say we want democracy.
Do we want democracy, or do we just want victory?
There is a difference. For too many political actors and their supporters, democracy is apparently sacred only when it produces the result they wanted. When their candidate wins, INEC becomes an institution of integrity, the process becomes credible, the voters become wise, and the whole thing gets called a triumph of the people’s will. When their candidate loses, the same voters become manipulated, the same commission becomes compromised, the same system becomes rotten, and democracy is suddenly “under threat.” That is not democracy. It ts political opportunism dressed up in democratic language.
There is an irony here, because Osun’s own history should have taught us to treat election results with more sobriety than this. The state’s 2022 governorship race went through prolonged litigation. INEC initially declared Adeleke the winner, a tribunal later annulled that result and declared Gboyega Oyetola winner instead, and the Court of Appeal then overturned the tribunal and restored Adeleke’s victory. The lesson from that episode should have been simple: elections are processes, not emotions. If a candidate or party genuinely believes an election was manipulated, there are lawful ways to challenge it. If polling-unit figures don’t match the final declaration, that can be documented. If there was over-voting, ballot snatching, intimidation, or unlawful interference, evidence can be presented. If the commission breached its own rules, the courts can look into it. That is what democracy actually asks of us. It does not demand that losers applaud winners. It demands that losers accept that a lawful process exists for resolving disputes.
There’s nothing undemocratic about challenging an election. The right to do so is itself part of democracy. The problem starts when allegations become a substitute for evidence, when social media becomes the courtroom, and when people declare an election fraudulent simply because their candidate didn’t win. That’s where the hypocrisy turns dangerous.
Even before the election, both sides had already shown how quickly political actors accuse one another of plotting to manipulate the process. Accord accused the APC of harbouring hackers supposedly planning to compromise INEC’s digital system, and the APC dismissed the claim as false and baseless (Punch Newspapers). What that tells us is that the suspicion didn’t begin after results were announced. Political camps had already built narratives about what might happen if the election didn’t go their way.
And that’s another problem in Nigerian politics. We frequently decide what an election means before we’ve even voted. If our candidate wins, we say the people have spoken. If our candidate loses, we ask who silenced the people. Before the vote, parties predict landslides, supporters swear their candidate cannot lose, and leaders assure their followers the people are firmly behind them. Then the votes are counted, and the same people who were absolutely certain of victory become absolutely certain the election must have been rigged.
Maybe the more honest position is to admit that elections are simply unpredictable. Voters aren’t extensions of political parties. They’re not obligated to vote according to social media trends, campaign promises, ethnic calculations, religious expectations, or the confident predictions of political commentators. A voter can listen to a politician for months and still vote differently at the polling unit. That’s the entire point of a secret ballot.
Osun voters were presented with choices, and the final collation showed Adeleke winning 19 of the state’s 30 local government areas, according to reports (Thisdaylive). That doesn’t automatically mean every aspect of the election was perfect, and this is another distinction Nigerians need to learn to make: an election can have irregularities without the whole election being fraudulent. The Centre for Democracy and Development described the poll as generally peaceful while still noting operational challenges, and other election-monitoring reports raised concerns about BVAS failures and vote buying (Punch Newspapers). Those concerns shouldn’t be waved away. If there was vote buying, investigate it. If BVAS malfunctioned somewhere, find out what happened. If voters were intimidated, identify who did it. If ballots were snatched, determine where and how. If results uploaded to IReV don’t match the physical results from polling units, explain the discrepancy.
That’s what serious democracy looks like. It doesn’t require choosing between blindly defending INEC and blindly accusing it. We should be capable of something more mature: demanding evidence, examining it, and letting institutions act on what it actually shows.
Unfortunately, our political discourse rarely works that way. We’ve built a culture where an allegation is treated as proof if it favours our side and dismissed as propaganda if it favours the other. The same person who spent weeks demanding INEC publish results electronically will dismiss those same electronic results the moment they hurt his candidate. The same person who once insisted the courts must be respected will call the judiciary compromised the day a judgment goes against his camp. The same person who celebrated an electoral defeat as “the will of the people” last year will call another candidate’s win “the manipulation of the people” this year.
That’s the hypocrisy we need to confront. Democracy is not in danger because your candidate lost. Democracy is in danger when you believe your candidate has to win for the process to count as legitimate. That distinction matters. The legitimacy of democracy can’t depend on the identity of the winner. If Adeleke wins and his supporters say democracy has prevailed, they need to be willing to defend that same principle when APC wins somewhere else tomorrow. If APC celebrates the wisdom of Osun voters after a win, its supporters need to accept that same wisdom when voters choose their opponent instead. If ADC supporters demand transparency today, they need to demand it tomorrow too, even when transparency hands them a result they don’t like. Anything short of that is hypocrisy.
There’s something disturbing, too, about how casually we weaponise the language of democracy. “Democracy is under attack.” “The people have been robbed.” “INEC has failed.” “Nigeria is finished.” We hear these constantly, and some of them are justified. Nigeria has had genuinely flawed elections. There have been documented cases of vote buying, violence, intimidation, manipulation, and administrative failure, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. But precisely because electoral malpractice is real, allegations need to be handled with more responsibility, not less. When every defeat gets automatically labelled rigging, real electoral fraud becomes harder to tell apart from ordinary partisan disappointment. That weakens democracy. It also insults voters.
Picture a voter who deliberately chose Candidate A after weighing the campaigns. Candidate A loses, and his supporters immediately declare the election rigged. What does that tell the voter who chose Candidate B? It tells him his own vote can’t possibly explain the outcome, because the losing side has already decided that anyone who voted differently must have been manipulated. That’s an arrogant attitude toward the electorate. Voters can make choices we dislike. They can even make choices we consider foolish. But they remain voters, and democracy doesn’t give political parties ownership of citizens.
Maybe the most uncomfortable lesson from Osun is simply this: sometimes your candidate loses, and no amount of intellectual gymnastics changes that. A candidate can be more educated, more experienced, more eloquent, more connected, or more financially powerful, and still lose an election. A candidate can be mocked, underestimated, or dismissed by the political elite, and still win one. Elections aren’t popularity contests on X. They’re not decided by the loudest WhatsApp group or the number of influencers posting campaign graphics. They’re decided by ballots cast and validly counted under the applicable rules.
That’s why the Osun outcome deserves both celebration and scrutiny at once. Adeleke and his supporters have every reason to celebrate. They got the numbers required to return the incumbent to office. But a win shouldn’t become a licence for triumphalism, insults, or dismissing legitimate concerns out of hand. Oyebamiji and his supporters, in turn, have every right to scrutinise the election and pursue a legal challenge if they believe there are real grounds for one. But there’s a difference between saying “we’ve identified specific irregularities and we will challenge them” and saying “our candidate lost, therefore the election was rigged.” The first is democratic. The second is just emotional.
The media and political commentators carry some responsibility here too. We need to stop amplifying every allegation simply because it’s politically interesting. The information environment around Osun was already heavily contested before voting even began, and fact-checking and election-monitoring groups had warned about the risks of misinformation and political narratives surrounding the poll (Fact Check Africa). Journalists should be asking the harder questions instead. Where exactly did the alleged malpractice happen? How many polling units were affected? What were the original figures, and what were the corrected ones? Were the discrepancies big enough to actually change the outcome? Were complaints raised at the polling units and documented? Were security agencies informed, and were electoral officials present? Is there corroborating evidence? These are better questions than simply asking which party is shouting the loudest, because democracy can’t survive on vibes. It needs evidence. It needs institutions. And it needs citizens willing to apply the same standards to their own political allies that they apply to their opponents.
That last part may be the hardest of all. Nigerians have become remarkably skilled at spotting hypocrisy in other people while staying completely blind to their own. We complain that politicians are hypocritical, then behave hypocritically on their behalf. We complain that politicians divide Nigerians, then insult fellow citizens for voting differently. We complain that politicians refuse to accept defeat, then refuse to accept any result that doesn’t favour our own candidate. We demand free and fair elections, but what some of us actually mean is: free and fair enough for our candidate to win. That’s not democratic consciousness. That’s tribalism wearing a different shirt.
The Osun election shouldn’t just be remembered as Adeleke’s win over Oyebamiji, or as a defeat for APC, ADC, or anyone else. It should be remembered as another test of Nigeria’s democratic maturity. Can we tell electoral criticism apart from electoral denial? Can we challenge results without trying to delegitimise the whole system? Can we celebrate a win without humiliating the losing side? Can we accept defeat without inventing conspiracy theories? Can we demand accountability from INEC no matter which party benefits? Can we condemn vote buying even when our own candidate benefits from it? Can we condemn violence even when the victim belongs to the other side? Can we defend another Nigerian’s right to vote differently from us?
Until we can answer those questions honestly, our democratic problem runs deeper than INEC. The real danger isn’t just a flawed electoral commission. It’s a citizenry that wants its democratic institutions to behave like political servants. Democracy was never meant to guarantee our preferred outcome. It’s meant to guarantee a fair chance for competing choices to seek the people’s mandate. And once the people have spoken, the job of a democracy-loving citizen isn’t to stop thinking. It’s to scrutinise, verify, question, and, where necessary, challenge through lawful means. But after all of that, there also has to be room to accept reality. If the evidence proves an election was stolen, fight it. If it proves the election was credible, accept it. If it’s inconclusive, keep investigating. Just never confuse disappointment with evidence, and never confuse defeat with disenfranchisement. And never turn democracy into a religion whose only acceptable god is your candidate.
Osun has voted. Adeleke has been declared the winner by INEC. There will be celebrations, complaints, analyses, and maybe legal battles, and that’s normal in a democracy. What shouldn’t be normal is our selective definition of the thing itself. Democracy is not only alive when our candidate wins. It is not only credible when our party celebrates. It is not only transparent when the results favour us. And it is certainly not in danger simply because the candidate we supported has lost. Democracy is in danger when we stop believing in the process the moment it stops rewarding us.
That’s the hypocrisy we need to confront before the next election, and before the next result gives us another chance to prove we only love democracy when it agrees with us. Because in the end, the real test of a democrat isn’t how he behaves when his candidate wins. It’s how he behaves when his candidate loses.
