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Oyo State’s All Progressives Congress governorship candidate, Senator Sharafadeen Alli, approved a new set of campaign appointments Thursday, structuring leadership across the state’s three senatorial districts ahead of the 2027 gubernatorial election.
Alli, who represents Oyo South in the National Assembly, announced the appointments in a statement issued in Ibadan, building on the earlier appointment of Chief Yemi Aderibigbe as Director-General of the campaign organization.
Hon. Sola Ogunbode was named Deputy Director-General, tasked with supporting Aderibigbe in coordinating campaign activities across the state. Three Assistant Directors-General were also appointed to lead district-level operations: Barrister Lowo Obisesan for Oyo South, Rt. Hon. Asimiyu Alarape for Oyo Central, and Hon. Rasaq Raji for Oyo North.
“The appointments are expected to deepen grassroots mobilisation, enhance coordination across the three senatorial districts and reinforce the campaign’s readiness ahead of the 2027 governorship election in the state,” Alli said in the statement.
Alli expressed confidence that the appointees would bring political experience, leadership capacity, and commitment toward securing an APC victory in the race. He framed the campaign structure as intentionally broad-based, pledging that no faction within the party would be excluded from the effort.
“Let me assure all our party men and women that this campaign will be all-inclusive. No one will be left behind. Every ward, every local government, every interest group within our party has a role to play in this project,” Alli said, adding, “We are one APC family. The task ahead is huge, but with unity of purpose, we will achieve it together.”
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The three Assistant Directors-General bring distinct political backgrounds to their new roles. Raji, who hails from Igbeti in Olorunsogo Local Government Area, is described as a grassroots politician and APC chieftain. Alarape, a metallurgical engineering graduate, served as Speaker of the Oyo State House of Assembly between 1999 and 2003 and later as Minority Leader from 2019 to 2023, in addition to serving as a Special Adviser during the administration of the late Governor Adebayo Alao-Akala. Obisesan, a lawyer and Ibadan senior chief, served as Commissioner for Environment under the late Governor Abiola Ajimobi and is the founder of Black & White Law Chamber.
The appointments reflect a common structuring approach in Nigerian gubernatorial campaigns, where candidates build leadership teams that mirror a state’s senatorial district divisions to ensure balanced representation and localized mobilization capacity across distinct political zones. Oyo State’s three senatorial districts, Oyo South, Oyo Central, and Oyo North, each carry distinct political histories and voting patterns that have shaped how successive gubernatorial campaigns in the state have organized their structures, typically pairing a central campaign leadership with district-level coordinators drawn from politicians with established local followings.
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Alli’s own path to the APC governorship ticket followed his tenure as a sitting senator representing Oyo South, a trajectory that places him among a number of Nigerian senators who have sought to move from the National Assembly into state executive office in recent election cycles. The scale of leadership experience among his newly appointed district coordinators, spanning a former state assembly speaker, a former state commissioner, and an established grassroots party figure, suggests an effort to combine institutional political credibility with local organizing capacity across the three-district structure.
The statement did not disclose additional appointments expected within the campaign organization, a timeline for further structural announcements, or which local government or ward-level coordinators would be named beneath the newly appointed Assistant Directors-General. It also did not address how the campaign structure would interact with Oyo State’s existing APC party leadership at the state and local government levels ahead of the 2027 race.
