By With less than a month to Osun State’s governorship election, APC candidate Bola Oyebamiji is laying out his pitch to voters, and it centres on three things many households in the state, according to him, feel, which are unreliable power, struggling schools, and stretched healthcare systems.
Meeting with leaders of the Osun Muslim Community in Osogbo on Sunday, the former Managing Director of the National Inland Waterways Authority framed his campaign as less about politics and more about problem-solving. Security, he added, isn’t separate from the economy, without it, he argued, commerce and growth simply don’t happen.
Oyebamiji told his hosts that his run wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision. Behind the scenes, he said, a team of experts has already been studying the state’s biggest pain points, power, education, healthcare, agriculture, and workers’ welfare, to shape what he’s calling an intervention-ready agenda from day one in office.
“My decision to contest for the governorship seat was deliberate and intentional,” he said, promising that resources would be shared fairly across the state’s towns rather than concentrated in a few favored areas. He also leaned into his faith, telling the gathering he was confident of victory on August 15.
Mustapha Olawuyi, president of the Osun State Muslim Community, praised Oyebamiji as a man whose support for the Muslim community over the years “cannot be quantified.” But he was careful to draw a line that the group itself, he insisted, isn’t picking political sides and its work is about faith and humanity, not partisanship.
Come August 15, Osun voters will choose from a crowded field of 14 INEC-cleared candidates. Oyebamiji carries the APC flag, while Governor Ademola Adeleke, who defected from the PDP to the Accord Party, is recontesting to keep his seat for a second term.
It’s shaping up to be one of the most closely watched off-cycle governorship races on Nigeria’s political calendar this year.
