511,067 Votes, 19 Local Governments: Adeleke Wins a Second Term in Osun
Just before 2am on Sunday, INEC's collation centre in Osogbo filled with the kind of noise that only comes from people who have been waiting all night for one number. When Returning Officer Prof. Joshua Ogunwole, Vice-Chancellor of the Federal University Oye-Ekiti, finally read out the figures, the hall answered him the way Osun answers its governor: "Imole! Imole!" — the light, the light.
Governor Ademola Adeleke had won a second term. Not provisionally, not pending a recount, not with an asterisk. Ogunwole's declaration, as Channels Television reported, closed a contest that had kept Osun guessing since polls closed on Saturday.
Here, in full, is the record Ogunwole put on paper.
The numbers, in full
Adeleke, running on the Accord Party ticket, polled 511,067 votes. Bola Oyebamiji of the APC came second with 444,815. Najeem Salaam of the ADC trailed a distant third with 17,180, Pulse Nigeria reported. The remaining eleven parties on the ballot, from the AAC to the ZLP, split roughly 9,700 votes between them, none breaking three thousand.
Add it up and 1,005,800 ballots were cast across Osun's 30 local government areas. Of those, 985,079 were declared valid; 20,721 were rejected. Adeleke's winning margin over Oyebamiji came to 66,252 votes — putting roughly 51.9 percent of the valid vote behind the governor against 45.2 percent for his closest challenger.
Adeleke: 511,067. Oyebamiji: 444,815. Salaam: 17,180. A margin of 66,252 votes, out of 985,079 validly cast.
Nineteen against eleven
Nigerian electoral law asks for more than a plurality: a governorship winner also needs at least 25 percent of the vote in two-thirds of a state's local government areas — 20 of Osun's 30. Adeleke cleared that bar comfortably, winning 19 LGAs outright to Oyebamiji's 11, per Legit.ng's breakdown of the local government results.
A wider gap than 2022
Compare that to the last time Osun handed Adeleke a mandate. In July 2022, he beat then-Governor Gboyega Oyetola by 403,371 votes to 375,027 — a gap of about 28,000 votes, or roughly four percentage points. This time the gap more than doubled in raw vote terms, to 66,252, and widened to nearly seven percentage points.
Turnout told a quieter story than the margin did. Of the 2,339,233 Osun residents on the voter roll, and the 1,906,390 who collected their PVCs, roughly 1,005,800 ballots were actually cast on Saturday — turnout of roughly 43 percent of registered voters. A decisively wide margin, in other words, was still decided by fewer than half the people entitled to decide it.
The count was not entirely free of tension. On Saturday, Adeleke's camp raised an alarm over an alleged plot to hijack collation centres, Channels Television reported. No disruption of that kind showed up in Sunday's declaration — Ogunwole read out figures for all 30 local government areas, and the process that mattered ran its course.
What happens next
Adeleke is set to be sworn in for a second term on the strength of Sunday's number. Osun's own recent history suggests that number may not be the last word — this state has sent six of its last seven governorship results to a courtroom, including Adeleke's own 2022 win, which spent nearly a year under legal challenge before the Supreme Court confirmed it. Whether 2026 follows that pattern is a question for the weeks ahead.
For now, the only number that matters is the one on the record: 511,067.
Everything else — the speeches, the phone calls from Abuja, the math for 2027 — starts from that single figure.
