The Wound That Made Him
Every origin story needs a villain, and for a long stretch of Bola Tinubu’s political life, that villain wore Olusegun Obasanjo’s face. In 2004, Governor Tinubu carved 37 Local Council Development Areas out of Lagos’s constitutionally recognised 20, arguing that a city of that density could not be governed from twenty town halls. Obasanjo, never a man to let a rival’s initiative go unpunished, withheld the federal allocations meant for Lagos’s local governments, treating the new councils as constitutionally unknown and therefore unfundable. Lagos sued. The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Uwais, held that the President had no constitutional authority to withhold allocations due to local governments, a judgment that ought to have ended the matter within the hour. It did not. The funds stayed frozen until 2007, released only after Obasanjo left office and Umaru Yar’Adua succeeded him.
It is one of the great case studies in Nigerian constitutionalism: a court can be right and still be irrelevant to a determined executive with a grudge and a treasury. Tinubu, to his credit, absorbed the lesson thoroughly. The question, twenty-two years later, is which part of the lesson he kept: that federal overreach against local government funding is unconstitutional, or that it works anyway if you can outlast the news cycle.
The Cousin in Osogbo
Osun State occupies an odd place in Tinubu’s personal mythology. Lagos is the seat of his power, but his ancestral roots are traced to Iragbiji in Osun’s Boripe Local Government Area, the same hometown as Gboyega Oyetola, his cousin and one of his closest political allies, who governed the state from 2018 to 2022. When Oyetola lost to Ademola Adeleke in 2022, he did not simply lose an election. He lost a family seat, and in Nigerian politics, family seats are litigated long after the tribunal has closed.
The mechanism of that litigation has been the local government system, and here the facts deserve some care because both sides have mangled them for effect. In October 2022, weeks before Oyetola left office, LG elections were conducted and APC candidates declared winners across the board. Days before Adeleke’s inauguration, the Federal High Court in Osogbo nullified that election, and the incoming governor appointed caretaker committees to run the councils, a move APC lawyers correctly noted sat awkwardly against Section 7(1)’s guarantee of democratically elected councils. The Court of Appeal agreed in February 2025, nullifying the Federal High Court’s judgment and reinstating the sacked APC officials. Adeleke, rather than comply, pressed ahead with fresh elections in February 2025 under his own state electoral body, producing a second, PDP-flavoured set of council officials whose legitimacy the APC has never accepted.
Cutting the Cord
Into this tangle stepped the federal government, and here the Obasanjo parallel writes itself almost too neatly. Since that dispute, Osun’s local governments have had federal allocations withheld for nearly two years, a freeze that has outlasted the legal argument that supposedly justified it. The irony is not subtle. The same Supreme Court jurisprudence on local government autonomy, the one requiring that funds flow to democratically elected councils rather than governors’ appointees, has been invoked by APC figures to justify withholding money from Osun, and by PDP figures to insist the money belongs to whichever slate of officials the courts most recently favoured. Everyone is suddenly a constitutionalist when it suits the ledger.
What makes the “constitutional principle” defence difficult to sustain is the company it keeps. State governments across the political spectrum, APC included, have run their own caretaker committees and off-cycle council arrangements without triggering federal financial strangulation. The Osun freeze arrived, and has persisted, precisely where the loser of a family election happens to be the President’s cousin.
The Family Business of Federalism
The timing, this week, borders on self-parody. With Osun’s governorship election held on 15 August 2026, the EFCC froze the state government’s own accounts days before polling, citing suspicious fund movements, only for Tinubu himself to order the accounts unfrozen, a piece of stagecraft that manages to look merciful and coercive in the same gesture. Adeleke has taken to invoking Chief Bola Ige, warning Tinubu against a repeat of the disputed 1983 election that ended Ige’s governorship of old Oyo State, which is either a sober historical warning or the most Nigerian subtweet in recent memory, possibly both.
What Obasanjo did to Tinubu in 2004 was petty, unconstitutional, and eventually corrected by a court that nobody in power bothered to obey until a change of government forced compliance. What is happening in Osun today borrows the same architecture: withhold the money, let the courts issue their rulings into the void, wait out the political calendar. Hurt people hurt people, the old chestnut says. It might be more precise, in Nigeria’s case, to say that men who were once denied the machinery of the state simply memorise its levers for later use. Obasanjo taught Tinubu what federal power can do to a rival’s grassroots government. Tinubu appears to have taken very good notes.
