A viral video showing Oyo State APC governorship candidate, Senator Sharafadeen Alli, with a male student sitting on his lap has sparked a storm online — forcing the politician’s campaign team to hit back at what it called a “deliberate attempt” to sexualise the encounter.
The footage, which surfaced on social media on Wednesday, shows Alli seated with a student on his lap during what the campaign identified as an interview session.
The senator also appears to move his hand over the student’s leg, prompting some social media users to question the nature of the interaction.
But Alli’s campaign organisation has dismissed the insinuations, insisting that the video has been stripped of its original context and turned into a political controversy.
According to the campaign, the young man and the other people seen in the footage are students of The Polytechnic, Ibadan, who visited Alli to seek support for one of their programmes and interview him.
The campaign said the venue was crowded when the students arrived and there were not enough seats for everyone.
It claimed that Alli, in what it described as a spontaneous and fatherly gesture, invited one of the students to sit on his lap so that the interview could continue.
The campaign stressed that there was no sexual or suggestive intention behind the interaction and accused unnamed online platforms of deliberately portraying the encounter in an offensive manner.
It urged the public to consider the full circumstances surrounding the video rather than draw conclusions from a short clip circulating online.
Why Alli is in the spotlight
The controversy comes as Alli, the senator representing Oyo South, steps up preparations for the 2027 Oyo governorship election.
The APC formally unveiled him as its governorship candidate in July, with Hon. Adesoji Adedeji announced as his running mate. APC leaders in the state had earlier endorsed Alli as the party’s consensus candidate.
The campaign said the latest controversy would not distract Alli from his political engagements across Oyo State.
It also appealed to journalists and social media users to exercise caution before sharing material capable of damaging reputations, particularly in the increasingly heated race ahead of 2027.
The campaign described the controversy as “cheap political blackmail” and maintained that the election should be fought on issues such as development, competence and the welfare of Oyo residents.
For now, the video continues to generate sharply divided reactions online, while Alli’s camp insists that what has become a social-media storm began as nothing more than an interaction with students.
Watch video of the incident:
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