By Abiodun Oluwajedalo Sobekun
In Ogun State, the road to the Oke-Mosan Government House rarely ends at the party primary, more often than not, it detours through courtrooms and the administrative portals of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).
Across successive election cycles, opposition parties and disenfranchised aspirants have increasingly argued that the electoral body no longer functions as an impartial arbiter, but rather as a convenient instrument used by entrenched interests to destabilize formidable challengers or knock them out of the contest entirely.
Nowhere was this sense of institutional disenfranchisement sharper during the 2023 general election cycle than in the ordeal of the Labour Party (LP) and its governorship flagbearer, former Ogun State Commissioner for Finance, Kehinde Sogunle. On June 9, 2022, Sogunle emerged as the party’s candidate through affirmation by 100 delegates from the state’s 20 local government areas at a primary held at the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) secretariat in Abeokuta.
The exercise was conducted strictly within INEC’s timetable and monitored directly by INEC officials, who duly documented the proceedings in an official observation report. Yet, when the commission published its final list of candidates, Sogunle and several other Ogun Labour Party contenders were conspicuously missing. While INEC cited technicalities surrounding portal upload deadlines and internal party submission disputes, Sogunle and his supporters saw deliberate sabotage, an administrative ambush that left the surging “Obidient” movement in Ogun-State without a governorship candidate on the ballot and forced Sogunle to direct his supporters toward the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) days before the March 2023 poll.
For seasoned observers of Gateway State politics, Sogunle’s exclusion was hardly an anomaly, rather, it was the continuation of a pattern stretching back over a decade. The blueprint was laid during the 2011 election cycle amid the bitter feud between outgoing Governor Gbenga Daniel and former President Olusegun Obasanjo. When parallel primaries produced rival PDP lists.
INEC initially rejected the list submitted by the party’s national leadership before recognizing the Obasanjo camp’s candidate, Gen. Adetunji Olurin. That administrative pivot forced Daniel’s preferred candidate, Gboyega Nasir Isiaka (GNI), off the PDP platform and onto the ballot of the Peoples Party of Nigeria (PPN) following frantic, last-minute litigation.
Eight years later, during the 2019 cycle, a remarkably similar script played out. Despite the PDP National Working Committee submitting Ladi Adebutu’s name as its duly elected governorship flagbearer, INEC published the name of Senator Buruji Kashamu, leader of a rival state faction citing Federal High Court orders.
Opposition stalwarts widely condemned the move as a calculated effort to weaponize judicial technicalities, fracture the anti-incumbent vote, and clear the path for the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). By 2023, even as Kehinde Sogunle was being shut out of the race entirely, the Ogun PDP was once again plunged into months of ballot uncertainty following parallel primaries and conflicting court rulings involving Segun Sowunmi and Jimi Lawal.
Ladi Adebutu only regained his place on the ballot after a January 2023 Supreme Court judgment overturned the lower court orders just weeks before the election. The cycle has repeated itself yet again ahead of the 2027 elections when, in October 2026, INEC omitted Ladi Adebutu from its final list of candidates over alleged discrepancies in the PDP’s membership register under Section 77(6) of the Electoral Act. It took a Federal High Court ruling on November 13, 2026, to force the commission to restore his name, with the court admonishing INEC for acting ultra vires by attempting to unilaterally disqualify a candidate whose primary it had already monitored without objection.
Taken together, these recurring episodes paint a troubling portrait of electoral administration manipulation in Ogun State. While INEC routinely defends its actions as strict adherence to statutory deadlines, portal protocols, and court orders, the practical consequence of its decisions tells a different story.
When an electoral commission can monitor a primary, issue an official observation report validating the exercise, in some cases publish the name on its temporary lists and later still erase the resulting candidate from the ballot on procedural technicalities, ceases to look like a neutral referee. Instead, INEC increasingly appears as a potent political weapon, routinely deployed to weaken strong oppositions, sow confusion among voters, and tilt the electoral playing field decisively in favor of the ruling establishment.
By
*Abiodun Oluwajedalo Sobekun*
Igbo Erunbe
Obafemi Owode Local Government Area of Ogun State
