Wike: I’d Have Helped APC Win Osun If Tinubu Wanted It

FCT Minister Nyesom Wike has made a bold claim about the outcome of the Osun governorship election, asserting that he would have travelled to the state and secured victory for the All Progressives Congress if President Bola Tinubu had chosen to pursue the contest at all costs. 

The declaration was made on Tuesday, August 18, 2026, while the minister was inspecting flood-prone areas in Maitama, Abuja, and it drew immediate attention for the directness with which he suggested the outcome was a matter of political choice rather than electoral inevitability. 

Governor Ademola Adeleke had been declared the winner of the Osun poll by the Independent National Electoral Commission just days earlier, defeating the APC’s Bola Oyebamiji with 511,067 votes on the Accord Party platform.

Wike was unambiguous about what he believed his own presence would have meant for the result. 

“If the President had wanted to win the Osun State election at all costs, I would have been there and we would have won it, and there’s nothing the governor can do,” he said, framing the APC’s defeat not as a failure of the party’s candidate or campaign machinery but as a reflection of a presidential decision not to fully commit the resources and political weight available to the ruling establishment. 

The statement positions Wike as a figure whose electoral influence he regards as decisive — a claim rooted in his track record of political mobilisation across the South-South and South-West in previous election cycles, and in his prominent role within the current administration as one of its most vocal and active ministers.

Beyond Osun, Wike used the occasion to project confidence about the 2027 general election, predicting it would be the easiest presidential contest President Tinubu has faced compared to his hard-fought 2023 campaign. 

He attributed that expected ease not to any surge in the ruling party’s popularity but to the condition of the opposition, which he described as crippled, homeless, and without direction.