Osun: ADC Hails Adeleke’s Victory, Demands Explanation For IReV Upload Delay
By Sunday Etuka
The African Democratic Congress (ADC) has congratulated Ademola Adeleke on his victory in Saturday’s Osun State governorship election, while asking the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to account for the reported multi-hour halt in uploading results to its IReV portal on election night.
In a statement issued on Sunday by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party framed Adeleke’s win as a victory not only for the governor but for the Osun State voters and opposition figures who it said united to resist what it described as pressure from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
The ADC said the result showed that no political machinery, however large, can override a determined electorate’ s will at the polls.
The party pointed to what it called an unusually heavy show of political force by the APC in the state, saying more than 30 state governors, the Senate President, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and numerous federal and state officials had converged on Osun ahead of the vote -an effort the ADC suggested was meant to signal what to expect nationally in the 2027 general elections.
Despite this, the party said the scale of the mobilisation did not deter voters, who it claimed turned out despite alleged intimidation, arrests and violence.
Central to the statement was an allegation that at around 8pm on election night, INEC was directed to suspend IReV uploads once it became evident that APC was trailing -resulting in what the party described as nearly four hours of interrupted result uploads, an interruption it says was also flagged by election observers.
The ADC said it believes this points to an attempt to manipulate the outcome or render the process inconclusive, an attempt it credited Adeleke and independent monitors with helping to expose.
The party has called on INEC to provide a full account of what happened during that window, warning that unresolved questions about the incident could foreshadow tactics in future elections.
It also cautioned against reading the APC’s loss in Osun as evidence of the ruling party’s commitment to free elections, calling any such framing “damage control.”
