A campaign procession is supposed to be a show of political strength. In Ilesa, Osun State, last Saturday, it became something far darker — a scene of gunfire, blood and outrage, with a 12-year-old boy paying the heaviest price for the recklessness of adults.
Tobi Ilesanmi was not marching with any party. He was inside his mother’s shop when a stray bullet found him. The shots had been fired in the direction of an All Progressives Congress campaign procession moving through the town, and the chaos that followed left several APC supporters wounded as well. Eyewitnesses described the sudden crack of gunfire scattering the crowd, and within hours, angry residents had taken to the streets demanding accountability. The precise number of injured persons remained unverified at the time of reporting, and Tobi’s condition was not officially confirmed, but the anger on the ground was unmistakable and entirely justified.
The Osun State Police Command moved quickly, at least in terms of physical presence. Spokesperson DSP Abiodun Ojelabi confirmed that officers were deployed to the scene promptly, cordoning off the area and recovering what he described as expanded cartridges and Amotekun personnel caps among the exhibits. That last detail — Amotekun caps — is not a minor footnote. It raises pointed questions about who exactly was carrying weapons at a political rally and under whose authority they were operating.
More striking still was the arrest of the Commissioner for Environment, Mr Mayowa Asejoorin, who was taken from the scene to the command headquarters for questioning. A sitting commissioner, present at a campaign event where shots were fired and a child was wounded, is now in police custody. Whatever the investigation ultimately reveals, that fact alone should concentrate minds across Osun State’s political class and far beyond it.
None of this happened in a vacuum. Osun State is weeks away from its August 15 governorship election, and the political temperature has been climbing steadily as rival parties push harder for advantage. That competitive pressure does not excuse the use of live rounds anywhere near a civilian crowd, let alone near a child sitting quietly in his mother’s shop. Ambition is not a licence for violence, and political loyalty does not extend to tolerating the endangerment of ordinary people going about their daily lives.
What happened in Ilesa is a test — of the police’s willingness to follow the evidence wherever it leads, of the political parties’ readiness to condemn violence without qualification, and of the state’s basic capacity to protect citizens from those who treat elections as a contact sport. Nigeria has seen too many cycles where incidents like this are investigated briskly, quietly shelved and then repeated. Tobi Ilesanmi deserves better than that. So does every resident of Ilesa who woke up on Saturday expecting nothing more dangerous than a noisy procession passing through town.