Olusegun Mimiko: A Politician Who Bounces Back  

On April 10, 2026, Dr Olusegun Mimiko resigned from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). On May 14, he joined the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ondo West. Politicians who bounce back usually manage it once. Mimiko has made a habit of it.

By one count, this is his sixth party change in under 20 years. In 2006, he left the PDP for the Labour Party to contest Ondo’s governorship. INEC declared the PDP’s Olusegun Agagu winner in 2007, but Mimiko reclaimed the mandate at the Court of Appeal in February 2009.

He won re-election on October 20, 2012, the first civilian governor in Ondo’s history to serve two full terms. His Abiye maternal and child healthcare initiative became the signature of those years. Then the bounces got harder. He returned to the PDP in 2014 to back President Goodluck Jonathan, who lost in 2015, and his chosen successor, Eyitayo Jegede, lost the 2016 governorship election to the APC’s Rotimi Akeredolu.

In 2018, he formed the Zenith Labour Party and finished a distant third in the 2019 Ondo Central Senate race with 56,628 votes. He rejoined the PDP in 2021, and the party lost the 2023 presidential election.

Now it is the APC. Mimiko praised the Nigerian Education Loan Fund and state policing. Ondo APC chairman Kolawole Babatunde called his arrival a homecoming, and Joseph Akinlaja, a former lawmaker, said it completed the move of Mimiko’s structure into the party.

The bounce is visible. On November 3, Mimiko read the communiqué of the South-west APC stakeholders’ meeting in Lagos, which resolved to rally behind Tinubu. Former Lagos governor Babatunde Raji Fashola attended.

On October 17, Ondo Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa, an APC member, renamed Akure’s International Centre for Culture and Events, known as The Dome, after him during his 72nd birthday celebration in Abuja. All that readers now need to look out for is how many votes the South-west delivers for Tinubu in 2027.