The air in the Osogbo hall carried the kind of quiet tension that always surfaces right before an election, that heavy realisation among reporters that the next few weeks will completely shape the state’s future. With just 38 days left before the August 15 governorship election, Osun State’s media landscape gathered under one roof for a blunt, soul-searching conversation — can Nigerian journalism, as it is actually practised on the ground, still protect an election from its own worst impulses?
The two-day Media and Election Stakeholders’ Interaction on Credible Polls, organised by the International Press Centre (IPC) in partnership with the Centre for Media and Society (CEMESO) under the European Union Support to Democratic Governance in Nigeria Phase II (EU-SDGN II) programme, pulled together an unusual mix for a media training — INEC officials, police, civil society groups, and journalists from print, broadcast and online, all sitting in the same room to argue about what election coverage in Osun should actually look like this time.
The subtext, never far from the surface, was the last one. Dr Rasheed Adebiyi, the Fountain University lecturer who led the first day’s session, put it plainly, invoking Ekiti as the cautionary tale. He warned journalists not to let Osun repeat a contest where voters went to the polls barely able to name the candidates challenging the winner.
A test bigger than Osun
IPC’s Executive Director, Lanre Arogundade, framed the stakes beyond the state’s borders. Osun 2026, he told participants, would be the second off-cycle governorship poll conducted under the Electoral Act 2026, and only the third major election supervised by INEC’s new chairman, Professor Ojo Amupitan (SAN), making it, in his words, a test case for the mandatory electronic transmission of results to the IReV portal ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Arogundade said the credibility of the Osun outcome would shape public confidence nationally, not just locally. He pushed stakeholders toward what he called dialogue rather than monologue — a demand that everyone in the room, from INEC to the police to the press, treat the coming weeks as a shared responsibility rather than a set of separate jobs. “No single tree makes a forest,” he told the gathering, urging collective ownership of the outcome.
That collective framing came with substance. Arogundade detailed IPC’s pre-election work under the EU-SDGN II project — training INEC voter-education officers and electoral staff on digital literacy and crisis communication, helping set up a six-member INEC fact-checking unit, and building a network of election misinformation trackers across the state. An IPC opinion poll, he said, found that Osun residents rank education, youth empowerment, rural development and agriculture as their leading concerns — a finding meant to steer newsroom agendas away from the defection-and-rally circuit that tends to dominate election coverage.
CEMESO’s Executive Director, Dr Akin Akingbulu, drew the line between the two institutions bluntly: “There is no credible election without a credible media, and no democracy without both.” He asked journalists to make voter education, misinformation-tracking and inclusive coverage — particularly of women, youths and persons with disabilities — a routine part of the job rather than a special project.
IPC’s programme manager, Stella Nwofia, was more direct still about where the burden sits. She told journalists their reporting “must safeguard information integrity” and that the trust Osun voters place in the process “largely rests on the shoulders of the media.”
Away from personalities, toward record
Much of the first day belonged to Dr Adebiyi of Fountain University’s Department of Mass Communication, who argued that Nigerian election coverage has a structural problem: it is episodic. Reporters chase the unfolding event — a defection, a rally, a war of words — and move on before anyone checks whether a claim made on the campaign trail holds up.
Adebiyi’s case was that this lets politicians, not journalists, set the agenda. He introduced what he called a Governance-Led Candidate Evaluation Framework, urging reporters to weigh both a candidate’s personality — emotional intelligence, accessibility, consistency — and their competency: administrative record, economic management capacity, crisis response. The point, he said, was to force coverage back onto governance rather than personality, interrogating campaign promises instead of simply relaying them.
He also pushed back on the economics of Nigerian journalism, without pretending they don’t exist. Newsrooms need revenue, he acknowledged, but insisted the profession should operate on what he called “profit with purpose” — commercial survival that doesn’t come at the cost of public-interest reporting.
AI, and the case against megaphone journalism
The second thread of the training, led by veteran journalist and media trainer Taiwo Obe of the Journalism Clinic, took a different route to a related destination. Obe’s target was what he called “megaphone journalism”, reporters who reproduce a politician’s statement without interrogating it.
“Our job is not to repeat whatever politicians say,” he told participants. “If a public official makes a claim, it is your responsibility to verify it and provide the necessary context for citizens.”
Obe’s session doubled as a demonstration of AI tools — Gemini, Perplexity, NotebookLM — as newsroom aids for summarising documents, extracting data from lengthy reports and speeding up research. But he was careful to frame the technology as subordinate to judgment, not a replacement for it. “Everything in this presentation has been done using AI, but the most important tool every journalist has is the brain,” he said, recalling that when he recruited for ThisWeek magazine years ago, the hiring question was never about degrees but about whether a candidate could think on their feet.
He urged journalists to move past the “he said, she said” template that still dominates Nigerian political reporting, pushing instead for explainers, data-driven stories and collaborative investigations that can be repurposed across formats — a single report generating a takeaways list, a background explainer, a visual breakdown. He also flagged mapping tools like Google Street View as an underused way to ground stories in place rather than stock photography.
What INEC brought to the table
The training’s second day carried the numbers that gave the rhetoric a spine. Osun’s Resident Electoral Commissioner, Oluwatoyin Babalola, told the gathering that INEC had received 95 per cent of the non-sensitive materials needed for the election, already distributed to local government offices for batching. Sensitive materials — ballot papers, result sheets — would be released in election week, she said, in line with standard procedure.
Babalola disclosed that all 3,763 Bimodal Voter Accreditation System machines required for the poll were in hand, alongside 664 backup units, with technical staff to be stationed across registration areas. She said the commission had brought forward the presentation of the official voter register from July 22 to July 9, 2026 and confirmed that Continuous Voter Registration had closed with 381,870 new voters registered and 50,747 transfer applications processed — 499,809 total transactions handled ahead of the poll. Training for election security personnel was scheduled to begin the following week, she said, alongside continuing sensitisation for young female voters and persons with disabilities.
She had one direct ask for the press: complete INEC’s media accreditation process before the August 2 deadline. The Nigeria Police Force, represented by its Public Relations Officer, DSP Abiodun Ojelabi, added its own assurance that adequate security arrangements were in place to protect voters, officials and materials on election day.
What the room took away
For the journalists who sat through both days, the training appeared to land less as a lecture and more as a checklist. Olalekan Akindoju of Rave FM/Western Spring Television, who also serves as Osun NUJ Secretary, said the sessions reinforced how personality-driven politics “creates governance blind spots” and left him more intentional about producing journalism that “informs, educates, combats misinformation.”
Akeem Adeyemi of Standard Times Newspaper said the sessions left him more attentive to newsroom process, not just fieldwork — pointing to the need for editorial coordination and fact-checking “long before election day.” He also took away a sharper focus on journalist safety, saying the discussions reminded him to assess risk and stay security-conscious before covering election-related assignments.
Sodiq Lawal of Within Nigeria described AI as “an ally, not a threat” to the profession, provided it strengthens rather than replaces editorial judgment, while Tunde Adeleke of Champion Newspaper took from the sessions a renewed commitment to move past “he said, she said” coverage toward reporting that verifies claims and holds institutions accountable.
Timothy Agbor of The Guardian said the workshop had opened his eyes to “the rudiments of fact-checking” as a tool against Nigeria’s worsening disinformation problem.
Whether that resolve survives contact with the campaign trail, the defections, the rallies, the pressure of daily deadlines, is the question IPC’s two days in Osogbo could not answer by themselves. What the dialogue did establish, on the record, is that the institutions responsible for the vote, INEC, the police, the press’ own trainers — have all now said, publicly and specifically, that the credibility of Osun’s election rests
partly on what Nigerian newsrooms choose to report between now and August 15.
