VitalObiter: The Diary of a Roving Counsel
“Gbajue Democracy” has lodged itself in my mind this morning as I survey the goings-on in Osun State ahead of the gubernatorial election slated for August 15, 2026. The coinage isn’t mine. It belongs to Professor Wole Soyinka, who with the greatest respect, though I think inappropriately, deployed it to describe a certain class of political actors in the last election cycle.
It sent me back many years, to the transition-to-civil-rule era, when a democracy then being midwifed was called a “voodoo democracy.” Between voodoo democracy and gbajue democracy, which is worse? Are we moving from frying pan to fire, or from fire to frying pan? I honestly don’t know.
In one week, Osun has seen war and there is still war. Lives allegedly lost. And this time the threat of incitement to kill has a name attached: Senator Francis Fadahunsi, representing Osun East, was filmed telling APC supporters in Ilesa to kill Accord Party members on sight. The video is in wide circulation. The police have summoned him; Governor Adeleke has petitioned the Inspector-General for his arrest.
Then the freezing of the state’s accounts by the EFCC, first without a court order, under its 72-hour administrative hold, before a court order followed for two more accounts. A face-saving retreat: President Tinubu, professing himself “deeply embarrassed,” ordered the EFCC to vacate the freeze, careful to insist his objection was to the timing, not the agency’s mandate.
We have seen this schematic before in Edo, where a similar freeze ahead of the last governorship poll preserved ₦12 billion for the incoming APC administration after it took the state from the PDP.
But I am not writing today because I am shocked. I am not writing because I have suddenly discovered which way the pendulum swings on the side of order. I am not writing as an APC loyalist or an Accord loyalist or a card-carrying member of any party. I am not even writing as a disappointed citizen.
Nothing that has happened in Osun in the last two weeks should shock any Nigerian prepared to be honest with themselves about how this country works. This is how we roll. This is how we do things.
So the real issue, for me, isn’t the outrage, it’s our appetite for being outraged. To feign surprise when the system does exactly what the system does is, in itself, naive, and a naivety we can no longer afford. I don’t write today to condemn what is going on. I write to interrogate our reaction to it. Because what we are watching in Osun is not an aberration. It is the character of the Nigerian state and its political class, particularly this present crop, who hold federal power the way hostage-takers hold a building. It is a preview. A window into 2027.
If we genuinely love this country and want it transformed, we have to stop dressing the system up to shock us and start naming it for what it has always been: a rigged system, an unjust system, an unfair system one we have known about for years and only ever seem to rediscover in the run-up to an election. The honest question isn’t “how could they do this?” It’s “given what we now know about the system, where do we go from here?”
Both parties in Osun will outdo themselves before Saturday. Both will play the game as it has always been played. One will win, one will lose. But the real losers, as always, will be the people the ones who trooped out behind Accord, the ones who stood behind APC, believing that either flag marks the promised land in our current democracy. It doesn’t. Believing otherwise is how we keep deceiving ourselves.
What is going on in Osun is condemnable. It is not right. But it is expected. And the people who will bear its cost, the same people cheering on either side have their fate resting not on which party wins, but on whether they can finally organize instead of agonize: ask the critical questions, hold power accountable, and insist, one day, that power actually goes to the people.
Does it, though?
But what do I know? I’m just a bloody roving counsel who, most of the time, doesn’t even know how to mind his own business. I have simply come to accept that minding other people’s business is my business too.
Taiwo AKINLAMI 