Why Is Davido Asking Trump to Watch Osun’s Election? 

Nigerian music star Davido, has appealed to US President Donald Trump and the international community to closely monitor the August 15 governorship election in Osun State, where his uncle, Governor Ademola Adeleke, is seeking re-election. 

In a post he made on X, Davido expressed concern about possible violence, intimidation, and disruption of the electoral process, asking Trump and the international community to encourage Nigerian authorities to protect voters and ensure that their votes count.

“We do not want bloodshed. We do not want intimidation. We want peace, transparency, and a free and fair election,” he said.

There is an obvious personal interest behind Davido’s intervention: his uncle is on the ballot. Still, it is concerning that a Nigerian celebrity of Davido’s calibre is asking an American president to watch over an election in his own country.

Trump, amazingly, has increasingly come to occupy the role of Nigeria’s unofficial superhero. His administration’s sustained interest in Nigeria, particularly its focus on the persecution of Christians, has created the impression that the American president is paying closer attention to Nigeria’s problems than many of the people elected to solve them.

Former Zamfara Governor and Senator representing Zamfara West, Abdulaziz Yari, warned against this tendency in 2025, telling Nigerians, particularly the political class, to stop looking to Trump to solve Nigeria’s security problems. No foreign leader, he argued, could fix Nigeria’s problems for us. The same should be true of our elections. International observers and foreign governments can raise concerns, and international organisations can issue reports, but none of them can do the work of the institutions that are supposed to protect Nigeria’s democracy. Davido’s call for Trump to pay particular attention to an election in Osun is much less reassuring than it is troubling.

And this year’s Osun gubernatorial election is hardly an ordinary election. Governor Adeleke is seeking a second term on the platform of the Accord Party after leaving the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in 2025, while the APC is trying to take back a state it lost in 2022. The campaign has also been accompanied by worrisome allegations that federal institutions are being used to frustrate the opposition. While the Adeleke camp has pointed to petitions before the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other agencies as evidence of political interference, the APC has denied having anything to do with the EFCC’s activities, insisting that the agency should be allowed to conduct its investigations without political interference.

This is precisely the sort of dispute that should be squarely settled by Nigerian institutions. Instead, every new allegation feeds the suspicion that the machinery of government can be turned against whoever happens to be on the wrong side of the political divide. This is the broader anxiety hanging over Osun. 

In 2025, the European Union warned that Nigeria’s democracy could slide into crisis ahead of the 2027 elections without urgent electoral reforms. Since then, opposition parties have continued to fracture, politicians have continued to defect and the APC has continued to expand its political reach. The question is not who will win Osun, it is whether the people contesting the election can reasonably expect the institutions surrounding it to play fair.

Thus, Davido’s appeal is much more than the intervention of a famous nephew campaigning for his uncle. It reflects the helplessness of a country in which citizens increasingly look outside its borders when they want someone to keep an eye on the people in charge.

But truthfully, nobody can step in now, much less Trump. Whatever interest his administration has in Nigeria is ultimately tied to American political interests, not any special responsibility to rescue Nigerian democracy. So asking him to keep his eye on Osun may attract attention, but it cannot fix the institutions that have made that attention necessary in the first place.