Gratitude wears a politician’s smile in Nigeria. Lately, that smile belongs to Senator Iyiola Omisore, the mathematician who helped tilt the All Progressives Congress (APC) toward President Bola Tinubu’s victory in 2022. Now, with Osun 2026 drawing near, the senator seems ready to collect what he believes he’s owed.
Omisore said the president himself asked him to run. “When President Bola Tinubu called me last year to contest for the governorship position, I told him former governor Oyetola would come back for a second term,” he told party ward chairmen recently. “But he said he wasn’t sure.” That uncertainty has since become Omisore’s opportunity.
He has begun rallying Osun’s APC network, urging ward leaders to dust off registers and prepare for the primaries slated for late 2025. His message is simple: loyalty deserves reward, and he won’t disappoint.
Yet, Osun’s politics is rarely so neat. Behind the handshakes and pledges lie shifting alliances, quiet rivalries, and memories of who backed whom when the chips were down.
It was Omisore, then the party’s national secretary, who steadied the APC ship during the turbulent 2022 primary. When some party leaders floated Ahmad Lawan as a consensus candidate, Omisore stayed fixed on the South-West project. “My mission,” he later said, “was to deliver the South-West for the Presidency. Which we are today.”
That mission succeeded, but politics, unlike mathematics, has no fixed formulas. Shortly after Tinubu took office, Omisore resigned his party post. Critics read it as a fallout; loyalists called it a strategy. Either way, the senator now seeks a return to Osun’s top seat under the same banner he once helped stabilise.
Whether Tinubu repays that loyalty with full backing remains the quiet drama beneath the surface. Endorsing Omisore could ignite old tensions within the APC, but ignoring him could appear ungrateful. Memory seems to fade fast in Nigeria; that is true. But it would be abnormal if Omisore is not betting that Tinubu still remembers who carried the numbers when it mattered most.
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