Emi lokan, Half Salary and a phone call: Inside the renewed Tinubu-Aregbesola feud

Two weeks after President Bola Tinubu’s South-West campaign coordinator, Prof. Sola Adeyeye, said the first person he called on his appointment was Rauf Aregbesola, the former Osun governor has branded the President’s famous slogan “despotism”. SIKIRU OBARAYESE traces how a decades-old alliance became one of the sharpest personal rivalries heading into the 2027 polls.

“Despotism is a single word for ‘Emi lokan’.”

With those words, in a video posted on his X handle, @raufaregbesola, on Tuesday, October 6, 2026, former Osun State governor and ex-Minister of Interior, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, took his quarrel with President Bola Tinubu to its most personal level yet. He went after the very phrase that carried his former political boss to the presidency.

“Despot. A man who believes that he has a divine right to administer space and time. That’s ‘Emi lokan’, not ‘awa lokan’, not ‘egbe lokan’, not ‘eeyan lokan’,” Aregbesola said in the video.

He went further: “Emi… that is affirming a divine authority. A divine right to rule. If that was not well understood then, I want to believe that Nigerians now know what it really means. So, we are now having it not just being merely said rhetorically but being physically demonstrated.”

He closed with a call to the electorate: “But Nigerians have the opportunity today to prevent the assault on democracy.” His accompanying post on X read: “Nigerians have the opportunity in 2027 to halt the current assault on democracy.”

Aregbesola is now the National Secretary of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), the opposition platform on which former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar is contesting the presidential election scheduled for January 16, 2027.

The phrase he dissected has a history. According to The Scoop, Tinubu said “Emi lokan”, Yoruba for “it is my turn”, in a speech to All Progressives Congress (APC) delegates in Abeokuta, Ogun State, on June 2, 2022, ahead of the party’s presidential primary. It became the rallying cry of his campaign.

A call that came two weeks earlier

The video came barely ten days after one of Tinubu’s own campaign chiefs spoke publicly of trying to woo Aregbesola back.

Former Senator representing Osun Central, Professor Olusola Adeyeye, who is the South-West Coordinator of the APC presidential campaign council, said on Channels Television’s Sunday Politics programme on Sunday, September 27, that the appointment came to him as a surprise.

“I called members of the party to find out if a mistake had been made. I was told that no mistake was made, that it was intentional. After I found out that indeed I was to be the coordinator of that campaign, the first person I called was Rauf,” Adeyeye said on the programme.

He explained the reason on the same programme: “For me, I thought I could give it a last effort to bring Rauf back to the fold of APC. I said this because Rauf is a tremendously talented person. Nobody takes that away from him.”

Asked whether anyone could reconcile the two men, Adeyeye was less hopeful. “I don’t know; only God knows. When things get to be like this, only the two of them can forgive each other,” he said. He described a reconciliation as desirable for the party and the President’s re-election, but said Aregbesola’s position in the ADC would make it difficult for him to leave without answering to his supporters. Discoverer Nigeria reported that Adeyeye said he would welcome Aregbesola back “with talking drums” if he chose to return.

But Adeyeye also made clear, according to Channels Television, that he did not regard the former governor as an electoral threat on his own. Pointing to the August 15, 2026 Osun governorship election, he asked: “How did the ADC perform, even in Ilesa? How did Aregbesola perform in Osun Central, where I come from?”

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“If Aregbesola is the candidate, it’s a different matter,” he said. “The truth is he’s still a magnificent person, much loved. If he were a candidate, believe you me, anybody would be hard-pressed to beat him in Osun, but where he’s not the candidate, even he must not deceive himself that he can automatically take the affection for him to another person,” he said.

Aregbesola has not said whether his October 6 video was a response to Adeyeye. What was said on the phone call, if it held at all, has also not been made public.

From half salary to “legacy of hardship”

The October video is the latest in a year of open exchanges. In April 2026, at the ADC national convention in Abuja, Aregbesola called on President Tinubu to resign and described the Renewed Hope Agenda as a “renewed scam”. The Presidency replied swiftly. The Special Adviser to the President on Information and Strategy, Mr Bayo Onanuga, in a post on X, described the gathering as an “illegal elective convention” of “a party of desperados and power mongers”.

“At the event, Aregbesola reportedly called on his former boss, mentor, and benefactor to resign,” Onanuga wrote. “His eight years as governor of Osun State were characterised by unmitigated hardship for the people. Under his half-baked socialist policies, civil servants went unpaid for months, and those who were paid received only a fraction of their salaries,” he wrote.

He added: “No, Rauf, the Renewed Hope Agenda is not a scam. The real scammers are the politicians gathered inside the SPV called ADC.” Leadership also reported Onanuga as criticising Aregbesola’s tenure as Interior Minister, citing jailbreaks including the Kuje prison escape.

Four months later, the President spoke for himself. On August 21, 2026, the Nigerian Tribune reported that while receiving Osun State Governor Ademola Adeleke at the Presidential Villa, days after Adeleke won the August 15 governorship election, Tinubu revived the nickname that trailed Aregbesola’s second term.

“In your state, I know a man that I raised who is nicknamed half salary,” the President said, while criticising Atiku’s proposal to restore fuel subsidy. In recent reporting, it is the first time Tinubu himself has publicly hit back at his former ally, rather than through aides.

The words “a man that I raised” go to the heart of the matter. Aregbesola’s rise is tied to Tinubu. He was Director of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Campaign Organisation that drove Tinubu’s 1999 victory in Lagos and his return in 2003, and he served as Lagos Commissioner for Works and Infrastructure under Tinubu.

How it fell apart

The cracks go back to the 2018 Osun succession. Aregbesola himself traced it there. Addressing loyalists in Ijebu-Jesa in 2022, he said, as reported, “When he (Tinubu) will hand over the present governor to me around July of 2018, he (Tinubu) declared that he (Oyetola) will succeed me and continue my good works. That was what he told me. He knows he has not done so if he is listening now and he has failed to call my successor to order,” Aregbesola said.

Gboyega Oyetola had been Aregbesola’s chief of staff. Many reported at the time that Oyetola was not Aregbesola’s choice in 2018. Once in office, the two fell out over control of the party, and Aregbesola’s loyalists formed The Osun Progressives (TOP). Parallel congresses in October 2021 produced two state executives: Rasaq Salinsile led the TOP faction, while Prince Gboyega Famodun led the one loyal to Oyetola, according to Daily Trust and The Guardian.

In 2021, the intervention by Tinubu and former Governor Bisi Akande to reconcile both men failed. In the February 19, 2022 APC governorship primary, Oyetola beat Aregbesola’s candidate, Moshood Adeoti, by 222,169 votes to 12,921, according to Punch. Aregbesola’s camp rejected the result; his media aide, Sola Fasure, said it was “farcically counted in favour of the governor”. Oyetola went on to lose the July 2022 election to Adeleke.

Adeyeye has now reopened that wound from within the APC.

Missing from the council

Aregbesola’s attack comes at an awkward time inside his own party. It was reported that he was missing from the ADC presidential campaign council list released in September by Atiku. However, the party’s National Publicity Secretary, Bolaji Abdullahi, said the omission should not be read as estrangement.

That leaves questions about the exact role the ADC’s national scribe will play in the 2027 race. Adeyeye’s remark about whether Aregbesola’s goodwill can transfer to another candidate is pointed at exactly that.