…Says FG is broke, Governors will fund PBAT’s 2027 campaign

As 2027 closes in, the Ogun Governor abandons the Government House for a Senate seat, armed with a secret presidential pact, a bitter grudge against Gbenga Daniel, and a political record that may yet destroy him

There was nothing casual about the gathering at Iperu last Tuesday. No cameras. No press aides hovering at the door. No carefully crafted talking points printed on glossy paper. Just Governor Dapo Abiodun, surrounded by a select circle of loyalists and political stakeholders, speaking with the kind of candour that only closed rooms permit, the kind men like him rarely allow the public to hear.

What he told that room, according to multiple sources familiar with the briefing, was extraordinary even by the elastic standards of Nigerian politics.

He had secured President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s personal endorsement for the Ogun East Senatorial race. The nod, he confided, had not come easily. It had not come cheaply either. It arrived, barely, only days before that very meeting, which is precisely why he was now, at this late stage, seeking formal adoption from the leaders before him. The arrangement, as he framed it, was part of a larger architecture: Nigeria’s governors had collectively promised to finance President Tinubu’s 2027 re-election campaign. The Federal Government, he said bluntly, was broke. In exchange for that financial commitment, the governors would be guaranteed their own return, and their senatorial tickets.

It was the most unvarnished thing anyone at that meeting had likely heard from a sitting governor in years.

Whether Abiodun’s account of a presidential endorsement holds, or whether it is the kind of political inflation that desperate men indulge in behind closed doors, is a matter that Aso Rock has not publicly addressed. Presidential endorsements in Nigerian politics are frequently claimed, rarely confirmed, and almost always contested.

What is harder to dismiss is the broader logic he was describing. The relationship between Tinubu and his governors has always been transactional at its foundation, that is not cynicism, it is simply how Nigerian executive politics is structured. That governors would be expected to deliver electoral value in exchange for presidential cover, and be rewarded with political headroom in return, is a dynamic as old as the Fourth Republic itself.

What is new, and politically significant, is the specific currency Abiodun claims to have offered. He reportedly made a deal to personally nominate all APC candidates in Ogun State, finance all campaigns, and guarantee that Ogun delivers the highest votes in the South West for the President. It is an audacious pledge. It is also, many political observers in Abeokuta will quietly note, an almost entirely unverifiable one coming from this particular governor.

Dapo Abiodun’s political biography is a story of near-misses, disputed victories, and courtroom rescues, a record that sits uneasily with the image of a man now positioning himself as the president’s most bankable asset in the South West.

In 2015, he lost to Buruji Kashamu in the race for Ogun East Senate. In 2019, his first gubernatorial bid was so fiercely contested by Adekunle Akinlade — backed then by his predecessor Ibikunle Amosun — that the result went through multiple legal battles before Abiodun’s victory was finally affirmed. In 2023, the contest against Ladi Adebutu produced perhaps the most damaging episode of all: a result that most credible political observers in Ogun State regarded as one that Adebutu won on the ground, and that Abiodun retrieved through the courts.

He has governed Ogun State for eight years. But he has never, in any of those contests, demonstrated the capacity to win on sheer popularity. What he has demonstrated, repeatedly, is an aptitude for surviving elections through legal machinery and institutional leverage. It is a distinction that matters enormously as 2027 approaches, because the Senate race he now seeks will not be fought on his home turf in the same way a governorship was.

Worse still, there is the question of perjury. There are documented concerns, some already working their way through legal channels, about statutory declarations and affidavits Abiodun swore in connection with previous electoral processes. If opposition parties or civil society litigants pursue disqualification proceedings on those grounds ahead of 2027, the APC could find itself without a candidate in Ogun East at a moment when the party can least afford it. Abiodun, his critics argue, is not merely a political liability, he is a potential electoral void.

If there is one force more powerful than ambition in Dapo Abiodun’s current political calculus, it is hatred. Specifically, his hatred of Senator Otunba Gbenga Daniel.

Those who know both men speak of a rivalry that has long since crossed the threshold of political competition into something far more personal and consuming. Abiodun, by all accounts, is not merely seeking the Ogun East Senate seat for himself. He is seeking to ensure that Daniel does not return to it. He has stated as much to confidants in terms that leave no ambiguity, the current senator will not be returned, and if it comes to that, it will happen over his dead body.

This is the context in which the simultaneous picking of nomination forms by Dapo Abiodun and one Bukanla Buraimoh must be understood. Both forms were collected by the same person, at the same time, and the connection between the two has been noted by observers tracking APC’s internal manoeuvres in Ogun East. Buraimoh is from Ikenne. Abiodun is from Iperu. Both towns fall within Ikenne Local Government, the same LGA where Abiodun suffered one of his worst electoral performances in 2023. The optics of having two Remo aspirants from the same council area, with visible logistical ties between them, is not lost on Daniel’s camp.

In fact, as it currently stands, all three aspirants who have picked APC nomination forms for the Ogun East race are from the Remo bloc. And that geographical clustering may ultimately prove to be Abiodun’s most significant miscalculation.

Gbenga Daniel, whatever his opponents say about him, carries a rare political asset: a bloodline that bridges Ijebu and Remo in a constituency that contains both. It is an organic credential, not a manufactured one. It has served him well across multiple elections, and it is the kind of thing that cannot be replicated by Iperu money or Aso Rock phone calls.

Abiodun’s calculation, stripped of its strategic dressing, is essentially this: he cannot survive in Ogun State as a political irrelevance after the Government House. The choices available to a Nigerian governor whose tenure ends are narrow, federal cabinet appointment, Senate, or political oblivion. He has made his preference clear. He wants the Senate seat. He believes the president owes him enough to give it.

But the architecture he has built is fragile. It rests on a presidential endorsement that has not been publicly confirmed. It requires him to outperform his own historical electoral record in a constituency where he has repeatedly underperformed. It demands that he neutralise Daniel, a man with deeper roots in the constituency than Abiodun has ever possessed. And it asks all of this while legal clouds gather around his own eligibility to contest at all.

There are men in Nigerian politics who have overcome longer odds than these. But most of them had one thing Dapo Abiodun has never convincingly demonstrated across a decade in the public eye: the ability to make people want to vote for them.

What happens in Iperu when the cameras are off is one kind of politics. What happens at the polls in 2027 will be quite another.

Seun Faleye, A social Commentator writes from Abeokuta