The Osun State Government has accused the All Progressives Congress (APC) of deliberately blocking the release of local government allocations in a bid to punish the people and undermine the state’s performing governor.
In a statement on Saturday, the spokesperson to Governor Ademola Adeleke, Mallam Olawale Rasheed, said the opposition party could no longer “hide under fake news” as court rulings had already validated the current local government leadership in Osun.
Rasheed noted that the June 13, 2025, judgment of the Court of Appeal upheld the sacking of former APC council chairmen and affirmed the legitimacy of the February 22, 2025, local government elections conducted across the state.
“The APC chairmen were removed by two separate court rulings as far back as 2022, and those judgments have never been overturned — not even by the misinterpreted Court of Appeal verdict of February 10, 2025,” he said.
According to him, prior to the June ruling, the APC made attempts to channel local government allocations to the sacked chairmen, but such “illegality” was thwarted.
Rasheed stressed that there was no judicial basis for withholding Osun’s allocations, adding that the Supreme Court ruling on local government autonomy had not yet been implemented anywhere in the country. Even if applied, he said, such payments must be made to the accounts of duly elected chairmen from the February 22 elections.
He alleged that President Bola Tinubu only became aware of the funds seizure from a newspaper report during the recent Eid holidays, implying that the directive to withhold funds came from the Attorney General without presidential approval.
“We therefore appeal to Mr. President to intervene and order the release of Osun local government allocations,” the statement read.
Rasheed urged the APC to “retrace its anti-people posture” and warned that Osun residents would “harshly punish” the party at the polls for what he described as “willful inhuman punishment of the people.”
