Ahead of the August 15 Osun governorship election, two issues cast long shadows over the state: rising violence and the growing menace of vote trading.

For weeks, killings linked to rival cult groups unsettled communities across the state. The violence, which intensified about two months before the election, persisted despite visits by the Deputy Inspector-General of Police for the South-West, Adegoke Fayoade, and the Inspector-General of Police, Olatunji Disu.

Bodies continued to surface in different parts of the state, while repeated assurances from security agencies that the perpetrators would be arrested offered little comfort to frightened residents.

With solutions seemingly out of reach, some residents appeared to adopt a simple survival strategy: stay alive until Election Day.

Then came another promise.

During a week-long visit to Osun ahead of the poll, the Chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission, Prof Joash Amupitan, raised hopes that, even if the violence could not be completely halted, vote buying would not be allowed to undermine the election.

At an interactive session with journalists at the Osun INEC headquarters in Osogbo on August 1, Amupitan announced that INEC would work with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission to tackle vote trading.

“We recognise that vote-buying has increasingly shifted from physical cash exchanges at polling units to digital financial transfers and pre-election account harvesting,” he said.

He added that INEC might also work with the Nigerian Financial Intelligence Unit and the Office of the Attorney-General of the Federation, while plain-clothes anti-corruption officers would monitor the surroundings of polling units and arrest suspected buyers and sellers.

The Commissioner of Police for the Osun election, Samuel Etaifo, also made his first public appearance since his appointment at the event.

The message appeared clear: this time, vote buying would not be business as usual.

The ICPC subsequently took the campaign to the streets of Osogbo, visiting markets, motor parks and other public places to warn residents against selling their votes.

The commission said its operatives would be deployed across all 30 local government areas of the state on Election Day.

Speaking during the sensitisation rally, the Resident Anti-Corruption Commissioner for Osun State, Yusuf Olatunji, warned that both vote buying and selling were offences punishable under Nigerian law.

“We will not be tolerating vote buying or selling and anybody culpable of this will be arrested and prosecuted,” he said.

With INEC, the ICPC and security agencies publicly declaring war on vote trading, expectations were high.

But when the ballots came out, the promises appeared to dissolve.

When the ballot became marketplace

On Election Day, vote buying was reported at several polling locations, with voters allegedly offered cash, food items and promises of transfers in exchange for their support.

In some places, political agents reportedly distributed raw food items before voting began in what residents described as an attempt to “wet the ground.”

Elsewhere, voters were asked for their bank account details, with promises that money would be transferred after their votes had been verified.

And in the midst of the transactions, some security personnel appeared to look the other way.

Police officers stationed at some polling units reportedly witnessed the exchanges without intervening.

Despite the earlier announcement that ICPC operatives would be deployed across the state, the commission had, at the time of filing this report, not announced arrests arising from the alleged vote-buying activities.

For some voters, the experience exposed a troubling contradiction: the agencies charged with stopping vote trading had promised a crackdown, but the transactions continued openly when it mattered most.

‘A vote was N30,000, N40,000’

In Ward 05, Boripe Local Government Area, a voter who requested anonymity for security reasons described how political agents allegedly approached voters with cash.

He said he was initially offered N15,000 when he arrived at his polling unit around 10am.

He declined.

But after he encountered difficulties with the BVAS machine, he did not vote until about noon. By then, he said, the price had risen.

“That time, a vote was being bought for about N30,000,” he said.

According to him, a political party had opened a register near the polling unit for voters who agreed to support it.

More troubling, he said, was that four female police officers were present and allegedly watched the process without intervening.

“Four women police were present and they saw what was going on. But they didn’t raise a finger to stop it,” he alleged.

The voter also claimed that the inducement had started long before election day.

Three weeks before the election, he said, adults in his ward received N10,000 from a political party, although the distribution was described as an empowerment programme.

The episode, he said, showed how vote buying had evolved beyond what happens at the polling unit on election day.

For voters already struggling with the rising cost of living, the money can be difficult to reject.

But what appears to be a small payment to an individual voter carries a much larger cost for the electoral system: it risks turning the ballot from an instrument of choice into a commodity for sale.

And in Osun, the question after election day was no longer whether vote buying existed.

It was how openly it could happen despite the army of agencies that had promised to stop it.

For Roseline, a voter in Israel Ward 8, Ilesa East Local Government Area, election day was not simply about walking to the polling unit, collecting a ballot paper and making a choice.

It was also an encounter with a marketplace where votes, according to her account, had a price.

Speaking to The PUNCH by telephone, Roseline alleged that agents of the Accord Party and the All Progressives Congress offered money to voters at her polling unit, with the price of a vote reaching N40,000.

But there was a twist.

Some of those who collected the money, she said, eventually voted for candidates of their choice.

“Several people that got money eventually voted for their preferred candidate. Police and NSCDC operatives saw how they were paying for votes, but they didn’t caution those involved,” she said.

Her account offers a glimpse into one of the complications confronting vote buying in Nigeria: the money may change hands, but the ballot remains secret.

For the voter, collecting the cash can become an economic decision; for the politician, it is an attempt to influence the outcome.

And for democracy, the transaction leaves a troubling question: what exactly is being bought when a voter takes the money but still votes according to their conscience?

Mudu of garri, then N20,000

In Ile-Ife, another voter said the inducement began even before voting commenced.

The voter, whose polling unit was located inside Oja Titun, said a political party agent distributed a mudu of garri to people in the market on the morning of the election.

He said he knew the woman who distributed the food items.

“She shared a mudu of garri to all of us in the market that Saturday morning before the election commenced. She didn’t make any request from us, but it was obvious she wanted us to vote for a particular candidate,” he said.

Later, after voting started, he said an agent of a political party paid him N20,000.

The two accounts — one involving N40,000 and another involving food and N20,000 — illustrate how vote inducement can take different forms, from direct cash payments to gifts distributed before voters enter the polling booth.

For voters struggling with rising food prices and household expenses, such offers can be difficult to ignore.

But former INEC National Commissioner, Prof Lai Olurode, believes the implications extend far beyond the immediate financial benefit to individual voters.

‘It was a bazaar’

Reflecting on the election, Olurode described the atmosphere around some polling environments as “a bazaar”.

He said the development was dangerous for democracy because it made it difficult to determine whether voters were choosing candidates freely or responding to financial inducements.

“You won’t know what the people are really voting for. Is it the highest bidder, or are they just voting their conscience or a combination of the two?” he asked.

Olurode, however, absolved INEC of responsibility for the vote trading, arguing that the problem reflected a broader culture of monetising elections.

According to him, political actors have increasingly come to believe that elections cannot be won without substantial financial resources.

He warned that the practice could undermine not only electoral integrity but also Nigeria’s wider development.

“Corruption is widespread, and you cannot isolate your electoral practices and say we want to shield our electoral regime from corruption,” he said.

For Olurode, the way out requires sustained voter education rather than campaigns that only become visible shortly before elections.

“Maybe we should do more in terms of voter education, so that we don’t turn elections into a bazaar,” he said.

‘The grandfather of all vote-buying’

Osogbo-based legal practitioner, Chief Abimbola Ige, was even more blunt in his assessment.

He described the scale of vote buying witnessed during the August 15 election as “huge”, arguing that the development was a bad omen for Nigerian democracy.

Ige alleged that some voters were offered as much as N50,000 for their votes.

“What happened on the 15th of August 2026 was the grandfather of all vote buying,” he said.

For him, the danger is not merely that politicians spend money during elections.

It is that money is gradually replacing ideas, policies and accountability as the currency of political campaigns.

He argued that candidates increasingly focus on what they can distribute to voters rather than what they intend to do for them if elected.

Yet the outcome of the Osun election also offered an interesting contradiction.

Despite the reported inducements, the incumbent governor was returned for another four-year term, leading Ige to suggest that money may not have the power politicians assume.

“It is becoming apparent that money is losing its magic wand in our electoral processes,” he said.

He urged political actors to recognise that there is a limit to what money can achieve at the ballot box.

Parties reject allegations

The allegations of vote buying were rejected by the political parties involved.

In separate interviews with The PUNCH, the spokesperson for the Ademola Adeleke Governorship Campaign Council, Pelumi Olajengbesi, and the Osun APC spokesperson, Kola Olabisi, denied that their parties engaged in vote buying.

Olajengbesi, however, alleged that as much as N110bn was brought into Osun in two tranches ahead of the election.

“Initially, there was N60bn and another N50bn, making about N110bn in a country where people are suffering, where the economy is suffering,” he alleged.

The allegation could not be independently verified.

Olabisi dismissed the claim, insisting that the APC had no reason to buy votes because its candidate was sufficiently popular to win the election.

He challenged those making the allegation to provide evidence.

“Anybody can make an allegation, but any allegation that is not supported with fact is as good as torn paper,” he said.

For voters who stood inside the polling units, however, the debate over who spent what may be less important than the experience they witnessed.

In one place, a voter said, N40,000 was offered.

In another, a module of garri preceded a N20,000 payment.

And in the middle of it all stood the ballot — supposedly secret, supposedly sacred, but increasingly surrounded by the language of cash and transactions.

The question now is whether Nigeria’s elections can remain genuinely competitive when the price of participation is increasingly being set in naira. (Punch)