Adelabu: Oyo APC’s 153,640 Members Can’t Produce 578,143 Votes

Former Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu

Adelabu: Oyo APC’s 153,640 Members Can’t Produce 578,143 Votes

IBADAN – The immediate past Minister of Power, Chief Adebayo Adelabu, has claimed that the total number of registered members of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Oyo State stands at just 153,640—not the 500,000 figure being circulated in reports claiming Senator Sharafadeen Alli won the party’s governorship primary with over 578,000 votes.

Adelabu made the assertion on Friday in a statement signed by his media aide, Comrade Femi Awogboro, continuing his dispute of the APC governorship primary election held across Oyo State on Thursday, May 21, 2026. The former minister, who resigned from his position as Minister of Power under President Bola Tinubu to contest the Oyo State governorship seat, lost the party’s ticket to Senator Sharafadeen Alli, the lawmaker representing Oyo South in the National Assembly. Official results from the primary showed Senator Alli polling 578,143 votes, while Adelabu secured 19,193 votes.

However, Adelabu dismissed these figures as inaccurate and misleading. In the statement by his media aide, he insisted that the total number of registered APC members in Oyo State is 153,640, making it mathematically impossible for any aspirant to legitimately poll over 500,000 votes. The statement further claimed that Adelabu enjoys overwhelming grassroots support across the state, based on figures being collated from various wards. It urged party members to await the official declaration of results and warned those in charge of the process not to allow anyone to truncate or alter the outcome. “Those in charge of the results need to be careful and not to be used by anyone to truncate or alter the results because it is already clear to us from what we are collating from each ward,” the statement said.

Adelabu’s assertion about party membership figures comes amid a broader context of the APC’s electronic membership registration exercise conducted in January 2026. At the time, the Oyo State APC chapter had set a target of registering at least 350,000 organic members across the state’s 33 local government councils, with the goal of increasing the party’s voter base from the 449,884 votes it secured for President Bola Tinubu in the 2023 general elections. The party’s Publicity Secretary in Oyo State, Olawale Sadare, had expressed optimism in January that the APC would be able to boast of over 350,000 members at the end of the registration exercise on January 30, 2026. However, Adelabu’s claim of 153,640 registered members suggests a significant gap between the party’s target and actual registration figures.

READ ALSO:

The former minister had earlier alleged widespread irregularities in the conduct of the primary election itself. Speaking to journalists on Thursday after voting at Ward 9, Ibadan South-East Local Government Area—where he polled 430 votes to defeat Senator Alli’s 3 votes—Adelabu claimed that in many wards, the election was conducted hours before the appointed time and results were “written” arbitrarily. “Reports reaching me state that there are a lot of gross misconducts in the other wards, ranging from various forms of infractions. In some wards, they conducted the election hours before the appointed time and wrote the figures they liked,” Adelabu had said. He also alleged that in some locations, his supporters were disenfranchised, intimidated, and violently chased away from voting centers, while in other wards, voting did not take place at all. He expressed concern that some party executives introduced a purported consensus arrangement despite clear instructions from the national headquarters that a free, fair, and transparent direct primary election should be conducted.

Adelabu vowed to submit formal petitions to the appropriate authorities across all five geopolitical zones of Oyo State, including Ibadan, Oke-Ogun, Ogbomoso, Ibarapa, and Oyo zones, insisting that the party leadership must investigate the conduct of the exercise to protect internal democracy. “Democracy is the government of the people by the people and for the people where nobody should be disenfranchised. Once you are a party member, you should have that freedom, that authority to pick an aspirant of your choice as the flag bearer of the party. This is Ibadan, this is Oyo State, and this is the centre of politics in the southwest. We should be able to lay good examples, and the process should produce a candidate that won transparently, freely, and fairly,” he had said.

Meanwhile, Senator Sharafadeen Alli’s camp has maintained that his victory was legitimate, backed by significant wins across key voting blocs in the state. According to party sources, Alli’s victory was reportedly backed by wins across major political bases, including the Okaka political base in Itesiwaju Local Government Area, an area long regarded as the enclave of Hon. Kola Olabiyi, a major ally of Adelabu. Party insiders described the outcome as an indication of Alli’s expanding grassroots appeal and acceptability among APC members across Oyo State’s 33 local government areas.

The APC national leadership is expected to receive petitions from aggrieved aspirants in the coming days, and political observers believe the outcome of the appeals process may significantly reshape alliances within the opposition party in Oyo State ahead of the 2027 governorship contest. Earlier reports had indicated that petitions were already pouring in from various states, with party sources noting that Adelabu had pre-primary issues that nearly affected his clearance. A group of governorship aspirants in Oyo State had previously issued a communiqué vowing to resist any attempt at imposition, insisting that due process, fairness, and internal democracy must prevail.

Adelabu, who served as Minister of Power under President Bola Tinubu’s administration, resigned from his cabinet position to pursue his gubernatorial ambition in his home state of Oyo. His camp has maintained that he enjoys overwhelming grassroots support across the state and that the official collated figures do not reflect the true will of party members. As the APC national leadership prepares to receive petitions, all eyes are on how the party will handle the growing internal crisis in one of the South-West’s key political battlegrounds.