By - APC’s national leadership extends the Osun State Working Committee’s tenure, including chairman Tajudeen Lawal, until after the 2027 presidential election
- Decision taken at a retreat in Maiduguri, effectively overriding calls from within the state chapter for a leadership change
- Move framed by party sources as a deliberate push for continuity, avoiding the internal friction a congress close to elections could bring
The national leadership of the APC has settled, at least for now, the question of who leads the party in Osun, extending Tajudeen Lawal’s tenure as state chairman well past the point where internal critics had hoped to see him replaced.
AfrikTimes gathered that the decision came out of a party retreat held over the weekend in Maiduguri, where the national leadership opted to keep the entire Osun State Working Committee in place until after the 2027 presidential election. The move effectively closes the door, for now, on a push by some state-level stakeholders who had been agitating for a change of leadership in the months leading up to next year’s polls.
A Chairmanship Shadowed by Election Losses
Lawal’s time atop the Osun APC has never been free of scrutiny. He first took over in an acting capacity in November 2022, following the departure of former chairman and late Owa of Igbajo, Oba Gboyega Famodun, before being formally confirmed as substantive chairman in June 2023.
Supporters have credited him with holding the party’s structure together across wards and local governments at a moment when defections threatened to splinter it after the APC’s 2022 loss of power in the state.
That defense has done little to quiet critics pointing at the numbers. The APC lost the presidential vote in Osun to the PDP’s Atiku Abubakar in 2023, came away with none of the state’s three senatorial seats or nine House of Representatives seats, and managed just one of 26 House of Assembly seats, Boripe/Boluwaduro.
The party then lost the August 2026 governorship race to incumbent Ademola Adeleke, a fourth consecutive electoral disappointment under Lawal’s watch.
Those results fueled a real push within the state chapter for change. One former local government chairman argued that leadership should be judged strictly by wins at the polls, and that the party needed a more energetic mobiliser capable of reviving grassroots enthusiasm.
A party chieftain in Osogbo went further, accusing Lawal of governing by delegation rather than presence, saying meetings had grown infrequent and decisions rarely got implemented once made.
Why the Party Chose Continuity Over Change
Other voices within the state chapter pushed back hard against replacing Lawal this close to an election, and it’s that argument the national leadership appears to have ultimately accepted.
Additionally, a party member in Iwo, Abayomi, argued that the 2022 and 2026 losses reflected a collective failure rather than Lawal’s alone, and that a new chairman would need months just to learn the party’s internal structure and rebuild relationships across factions, time the party doesn’t have with 2027 approaching.
A member in Ila, Kehinde Olamide, warned that swapping leadership now risked reopening old divisions and inviting litigation at precisely the moment the party needs unity most.
Sources present at the Maiduguri retreat told AfrikTimes the extension was a calculated move by the national leadership to lock in continuity across state chapters and head off the kind of internal wrangling that congresses so close to a general election tend to produce. Whether that calculation pays off electorally is a question that won’t be answered until 2027 itself.
