The people of Osun state have spoken, and they have elected Rauf Aregbesola for a second term as state governor. Congratulations must be extended to them by all and sundry without reservations. However, there are other parties in the just completed state elections that deserve our congratulations, and they must be mentioned and thanked.
Getting into town
I arrived Osogbo three days before the elections and made my way straight to the INEC Headquarters along Gbongan Road. The mood there was preparatory and security was high. I submitted my letter of introduction and was told to return the next day for my identity pass. Following that stop, the next part of the mission was finding a hotel, and this proved tough. Osogbo, the Osun state capital, is a small, but evidently growing city. There are hotels, but for an event of this proportion, the existing hotel accommodation was barely adequate for the mass of outsiders that descended on the town. I was eventually able to find a hotel, at the other end of Osogbo. Hotel Bafoo would in a way live up to its tag, “Paradise on Earth”. There was wi-fi, which worked only when it could be bothered. There was hot water.
The next day was spent largely talking to the common man. One of the lessons I have learned in my experience of covering elections is that to know how the elections will go, if free and fair, to speak not with politicians and their agents, but with the man on the street. At petrol stations where I stopped, at markets, in front of a bank, and at eateries, the choice of the people, in Osogbo at least, was quite clear – Rauf Aregbesola.
The old versus the new
On Thursday, accreditation was done and dusted. A word must be put here regarding the process of accreditation, and the point must be made that it varies from state to state, depending on the spokesperson for INEC in that state. In Ekiti, the INEC spokesperson is pretty organised, in Osun, Adenike Tasede, had that stereotypical attitude of wanting everyone to know that she was in charge. That led to a massive scrum outside of her office on that day, a scrum that did no one any good. Another thing – like it or not, online is here to stay, and the very nature of that beast means that we cannot afford to ignore it. Myself, and Ben Ezeamalu, the reporter from Premium Times, ran into trouble with Mrs. Tasede, because she accused us of breaking the results before INEC in Ekiti. She went as far as putting an asterisk beside my name so she’d monitor me. I took that in good stride because I knew that the good folks at Sahara Reporters, who did not even bother with an INEC accreditation (this is because their model relies on citizen journalists), would break the results anyway. They did not disappoint. At the end of election day, and a good 10 hours before the results were officially released, a huge public television close to Freedom Park was announcing the results, courtesy of Sahara Reporters. Other, traditional newspapers, also did the same on their online accounts, the Punch being the biggest culprits.

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