By - ADC stakeholders in Osun convene for the first time since losing the 2026 governorship race, with talk centred on rebuilding rather than dwelling on the loss
- Najeem Salaam, the party’s defeated governorship candidate, leads the session alongside sitting executive members and 2027 hopefuls
- Grassroots organising and internal cohesion emerge as the two themes party leaders keep returning to
Barely weeks removed from a governorship contest it did not win, Osun’s ADC chapter is already turning its attention toward 2027, gathering its senior figures at Oranmiyan House in Osogbo on Tuesday for what amounts to the party’s first real reckoning with how the last election went.
Dr Najeem Salaam, who carried the ADC flag in the governorship race, chaired the session himself rather than leaving it to party officers alone. Also in the room were members of the State Executive Committee and a cohort of candidates the party has already earmarked to run in next year’s state and federal contests, a signal that the meeting doubled as an early campaign planning session as much as a post-mortem.
Much of what got discussed traced back to the governorship result itself, with attendees working through what went wrong and what the party might carry forward. Two threads kept surfacing in accounts of the meeting. Party figures pushed hard on the idea that ADC’s internal cohesion needs work, and that whatever momentum it wants heading into 2027 has to be built from the ward level upward rather than assembled late in the race.
Whether that translates into any concrete restructuring, and how soon, remains to be seen. For now, the party has at least put a marker down that its 2026 defeat is being treated as a planning problem to solve rather than a setback to simply move past.
