OSUN State Governor, Ademola Adeleke, has directed the state Attorney-General to withdraw the suit filed against the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) over the freezing of the state’s statutory accounts.
He said President Bola Tinubu’s intervention has resolved the dispute.
Adeleke disclosed this in an interview with Channels Television on Sunday, hours after he was declared the winner of the August 15 governorship election and secured a second term in office.
He said he had decided to put the legal dispute behind him following a telephone conversation with Tinubu.
“I’m putting them behind. What else do I want? I have instructed my Attorney General to drop it. Mr President has done well. He called me. What more do I want?”
Adeleke said the president’s intervention was sufficient for him to discontinue the case, adding that he believed Tinubu was not initially aware of the EFCC’s action.
“Most of these things, the president doesn’t know. The president has a lot of foreign work and jobs to do,” he said.
Speaking after his re-election, Adeleke also alleged that former Osun governor and Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, Gboyega Oyetola, was behind the EFCC action.
“All these things is Oyetola because he is the cousin to the president. He is dropping the president’s name,” Adeleke alleged.
The governor, however, did not provide evidence in the interview to substantiate the allegation.
Oyetola, who governed Osun from 2018 to 2022, is a prominent member of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and was the party’s candidate in the 2022 Osun governorship election, which Adeleke won.
The relationship between Adeleke and Oyetola has remained politically significant in Osun, with the two men again emerging on opposing sides of the state’s political divide ahead of the 2026 governorship election.
The dispute began in early August, days before the Osun governorship election, when the EFCC placed restrictions on a bank account belonging to the state government.
The commission said it had been investigating the Osun government since March 2026 over alleged fraudulent handling of ecology funds, intervention funds and Federal Account Allocation Committee (FAAC) funds amounting to about N11 billion.
It said the decision to restrict the account followed the alleged movement of funds to suspicious accounts from August 2.
The EFCC’s action attracted controversy because it came just days before the August 15 election and the Adeleke administration condemned the restriction and described it as politically motivated.
The state government subsequently approached the Federal High Court in Abuja, asking the court to declare the EFCC’s action unlawful and sought N2 billion in exemplary damages against the commission.
The suit, marked FHC/ABJ/CS/1762/2026, was filed on August 5, according to reports on the case.
The controversy escalated when Tinubu intervened on August 6 and directed the EFCC to return to court to vacate the order freezing the state’s accounts and discontinue the related proceedings.
In his statement, Tinubu said he was concerned about the timing of the EFCC’s action because Osun was only days away from its governorship election. He said federal government actions were often attributed to the Presidency even when he had no prior knowledge of them.
The president said he had deliberately refrained from interfering in the operational activities of anti-corruption agencies but considered the timing of the Osun action sufficiently concerning to warrant his intervention.
Meanwhile, Adeleke in his interview on Channels TV on Sunday addressed reports that some members of his administration had been invited by the EFCC for questioning. He said he had instructed his lawyers to assist the affected officials.
“Well, we have been talking. I have been calling all my lawyers to go there,” Adeleke said.
He maintained that the invitations were politically motivated but acknowledged that some of the officials who honoured the EFCC invitations had been released after questioning.
The allegations of political motivation have been disputed by the EFCC, which has maintained that its investigation concerns alleged financial misconduct and that its actions were within its statutory powers.
Adeleke’s decision to withdraw the EFCC suit came shortly after his victory in the August 15 Osun governorship election.
The Independent National Electoral Commission declared Adeleke, who contested under the Accord Party, winner of the poll after he secured 511,067 votes. His closest challenger, the APC’s Bola Oyebamiji, polled 444,815 votes, giving the governor a winning margin of 66,252 votes.
Nanji is an investigative journalist with the ICIR. She has years of experience in reporting and broadcasting human angle stories, gender inequalities, minority stories, and human rights issues. She has documented sexual war crimes in armed conflict, sex for grades in Nigerian Universities, harmful traditional practices and human trafficking.