Journalist, television presenter and newspaper columnist, Dr Reuben Abati, has described Senator Francis Fadahunsi as a coward for denying, after the fact, words he delivered on camera before a crowd, and for claiming that the footage in which he told supporters to kill members of a rival party was generated or altered by artificial intelligence.
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Abati spoke on Arise Television’s morning programme on Thursday, two days before the Osun State governorship election, in a segment in which he also named two other politicians he said should be called to question under the Electoral Act, and set out the casualty figures recorded in the run-up to Saturday’s poll.
Abati’s central objection was to the senator’s attempt to control the meaning of words spoken in public and captured on video.
“I’ve seen translations of exactly what he said. He’s not the only one that speaks Yoruba, and he’s not in a position to say his own version, his own translation, is the true translation. We all had it,” he said.
He went to the words themselves. “He was using ‘ẹ pa mọ́n’. Even their mothers and children, ‘ẹ pa mọ́n’. ‘Ẹ pa’ in Yoruba language means kill.”
It was the denial, rather than the delivery, that drew the sharpest language from the presenter.
“And now he said he was being misinterpreted. He was quoted out of context. It was AI generated. I didn’t know he was such a coward,” Abati said.
He said a leader who holds a conviction owns it publicly. “If you have conviction as a man who is a leader — I think he’s a member of the Senate then you say so.”
On the retreat from the recorded statement, he added: “It’s just an act of cowardice. In fact, he should have been detained.”
Abati questioned what remained to be investigated, given that the remarks were made in the open, in a language widely spoken in the country, and preserved on video.
“I don’t know the investigation that the police still say they are going to do. Are they going to import an expert from the United States to come and interpret Yoruba, when we have the experts here in the country?” he asked.
He concluded: “So he has no excuse whatsoever.”
The presenter said the senator is not the only politician who has made such statements in the campaign, naming two others.
“There is also a lawmaker called Francis Enyade, an APC member, who was saying that nobody should come and vote in Odua ward on Saturday, except that person is going to vote for the APC,” he said.
He described it as an abuse of position. “Look at the effrontery, the impunity. A common lawmaker comes around and he says, if you come out and you don’t vote for APC, you will be killed.”
He named a third. “It’s another person, a fellow called Wale Adedoyin. Wale Adedoyin too was allegedly issuing death threats. So you don’t have only Fadahunsi, you also have Francis Enyade, you also have Wale Adedoyin.”
Abati said all three should be answering under the electoral law rather than offering explanations in interviews.
“Who should be called to question under the Electoral Act, Sections 118 to 133?” he asked. “And that is why INEC itself has been saying we need to have an electoral offences tribunal, an electoral offences commission, so that all these electoral offences before, during and after the election can be dealt with according to the laws of the land.”
He added: “May all these persons who have been threatening death and violence be reminded that there are laws to that effect.”
Setting out the security position, Abati said the police have deployed 15,000 officers and the Civil Defence over 10,000 paramilitary personnel, with youth corps members bringing the total to about 30,000, and that twelve local government areas have been designated high-risk.
“In the lead-up to the election, we were told that about 75 acts of violence have been recorded. Close to 50 persons have been killed,” he said. “Now there must be accountability for that. And we expect the security agencies to live up to their responsibility, and not to continue to hear of violence with all those security teams on the ground.”
Abati framed Saturday’s poll as the final test before the general election.
“I’ve previously described the Osun election as the dress rehearsal for INEC, in the sense that this is the last major election before the general election in 2027. So it’s a major test for INEC,” he said, noting that expectations are sharpened because the incumbent government in the state belongs to an opposition party.
“The question is, will the Tinubu administration play fair? Will it be able to deliver a free process, a credible electoral process?” he asked, adding that the responsibility rests at the top. “That is linked to the charge that President Bola Tinubu, at whose desk the buck stops, is being given an opportunity to demonstrate with this Osun election that he is in fact committed to the electoral process. The turnout, the outcome, is going to be of interest not just to local observers but also to international observers.”
He set that against recent developments. “Our expectation is that the president and his government will truly demonstrate that they believe in democracy and that a free and fair playing ground will be provided, particularly against some of the tensions in the lead-up to this election, with the arrests, with the violence, with the intervention of the anti-corruption agency, the EFCC, and all of that.”
Abati said the tension was evident in the precautions taken at a town hall meeting his organisation held in Osogbo, headlined The Battle for Osun State.
“We had to take special precautions to make sure that we don’t get caught in the middle of that tension,” he said. “Arise News had to make sure specifically that no two groups met at the venue. We gave at least some gap for whoever was being interviewed to leave before the other group would return. So there was no contact, absolutely no contact. That’s the kind of anxiety that the lead-up to the election in Osun State seems to have generated.”
The remarks at the centre of the criticism were captured in a campaign video in which the senator, addressing a crowd during a protest near the Owa Obokun Palace in Ilesa, is reported to have asked how many APC members had been killed before telling supporters, in Yoruba, that they should no longer hear anything about the Accord Party in Ilesa, and that from then until election day, on sighting them, they should kill them.
He is also reported to have disparaged the opposition party’s branding, describing the cap worn by its supporters as a “yellow fever” cap and the cap of an animal, while urging supporters to confront them. According to the reports, he dared those present to record his remarks and circulate them on social media.
Following public backlash and an invitation from the Osun State Police Command, the senator offered a series of explanations.
He said the expression was purely political and metaphorical, and that what he meant was that supporters should defeat the party at the ballot. He argued that because he spoke in Yoruba, his words could not be translated cleanly into English without losing their non-violent political meaning. In the alternative, he alleged that the viral footage had been altered using artificial intelligence and heavily edited out of context by political opponents.
Speaking after meeting the police, he said: “I had to obey the law to come and see our policemen, to ask them why they are inviting me. We have met, and I told them what I said, not the one manipulated by these mischievous interpreters of Yoruba language.”
He added: “I’m a Yoruba man. I spoke in Yoruba. Yoruba means a lot of many things. We said, come between now and Saturday, election, we will kill them with our vote.” He said the original recording runs to about 38 minutes, that a man whose identity he did not know had misinterpreted it, and that he would consider legal steps against that person after the election. “I’ve made my point as the leader of the people,” he said.
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