Could Oba Ladoja be part of a plot to impeach a governor who is almost at the end of his tenure? He himself having suffered that indignity when he was governor of the state.
Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, is not new to political upheavals. The sprawling ancient city was home to Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the first premier of the Western Region. Ibadan was started by warriors who proved their mettle in defending the Yoruba land from marauding Fulani warriors. Ibadan also has a proud legacy, “ija’gboro larun Ibadan,” meaning street brawling is the legacy of Ibadan. Ibadan saw a huge political fight of seismic proportions when the feud between the departing first premier of the Western Region, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and his successor led to a declaration of a state of emergency in the Western Region and subsequent massive election rigging, which snowballed into the tragic three-year civil war in Nigeria. It all began in Ibadan at the very Secretariat built by Chief Awolowo and used today by the governor of Oyo State, Seyi Makinde. Seyi Makinde, an indigene of the city, is governor of Oyo State.
But Seyi Makinde has no blood of Awolowo in his veins. Awolowo was a statesman; Seyi Makinde is a politician. Awolowo does not play games; Seyi Makinde is a game player who gambles with the destiny of the people of Oyo. Awolowo was a goal getter with an unequalled record for the rapid progress of his people in the Western Region; Seyi Makinde is in the class of late Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, a rabble-rouser who revels in power. Akintola was a grassroots politician who told lies to deceive the people to keep them following him. Seyi Makinde is also a rabble-rouser, a man who hugs Klieglight and would not mind lying.
Akintola begged Awolowo to succeed him, something which Awolowo did not want to do because of Akintola’s well-known lackluster performance. But Awolowo had to bend to pressure from some elders of the region in a compromise, probably for the first time in his life. He yielded power to Akintola, who immediately went for the jugular of the leader of their party, the Action Group (AG). Akintola would no longer be subject to party discipline and control until he caused mayhem, which disrupted all that the AG had achieved.
If tradition is kept in Oyo State, which inherited the secretariat infrastructure that Awolowo built, Seyi Makinde will be sitting on the table and chair that Awolowo sat on, which Samuel Ladoke Akintola also inherited and sat on. Seyi Makinde is the reincarnation of the late Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola. Seyi Makinde seems to have attended the political school of Akintola and graduated with flying colours.
The conflicting colours that Seyi Makinde wears are likely to snowball again into big problems in Ibadan of seismic proportions. Just as Tafawa Balewa, the first prime minister of Nigeria at independence, had a hand in the crisis that brewed between Akintola and Awolowo, where Akintola was used in an attempt to dislodge Awolowo from his confrontational politics against oppressors, today’s president of Nigeria, Bola Tinubu, a man best described in Machiavellian terms, is at the center of a row that may terminate the current democracy as it did that of the first republic. God forbid, but the nation must not fold its arms.
Other dramatis personae in the unfolding crisis are the Olubadan of Ibadan, Oba Rasidi Ladoja; Mrs. Florence Ajimobi, wife of the former governor of the state, late Ishaq Ajimobi, who gave the baton to Seyi Makinde as governor; the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Adeboye Ogundoyin, who became speaker at 32 and has done seven years as speaker; the Chief Whip of the Assembly, Gbenga Oyekola; the dictator, Seyi Makinde, whose word is law in Oyo State; and Ayodele Fayose, former governor of Ekiti State. Especially hilarious in the drama is the posture of Gbenga Oyekola, the chief whip, who described the governor, Seyi Makinde, as his “boss.”
He issued a statement on social media about a meeting that was held between Seyi Makinde and the legislators in the governor’s house. It is important to note that Seyi Makinde does not live in government quarters but in his own house in an estate called Kolapo Ishola. So imagine that the House of Assembly building had shrunk and was not able to contain the legislatures, and so they moved to the private house of the governor. After the meeting held around April 14, both the Speaker and the Chief Whip issued statements. The speaker said he had gone to the palace of Oba Ladoja to seek his support for a governorship ambition he nursed. During the visit, Ladoja asked him to help impeach Seyi Makinde and he will help him to clinch the House of Representatives constituency. Ladoja also offered him an unnamed huge sum of money.
Speaker Ogundoyin’s statement will probably be acceptable to the Mongols. He was the one seeking Oba Ladoja’s help, and now it was Oba Ladoja begging him to impeach Seyi Makinde with the offer of a seat in the House of Representatives and huge cash. Mind you, Ladoja is not from Ibarapa, from where the Speaker hails. Meanwhile, the son of Oba Ladoja, Sola, has disclosed that it was Ogundoyin who begged him to take him to Oba Ladoja. The statement of Gbenga Oyekola was no less amusing and illogical. After their meeting with the governor, he narrated the story of the speaker and how he rejected the huge sum of money and how he, as a member of the House Assembly, will never betray his “boss,” Seyi Makinde. This was a man elected into the assembly to provide checks and balances to the governor. How much worse flattery and servitude can be. A logical analysis is that both statements were part of a plot to undo the Olubadan and get to Senator Sharafadeen Alli.
Meanwhile, Ayo Fayose, himself a terrible character, had alerted the whole state that there was a plan being hatched to dethrone Oba Ladoja, an alert which both the Oba and the government of Seyi Makinde denied. Seyi Makinde had tried to scheme out Sharafadeen Alli, the consensus APC candidate for the Oyo gubernatorial race in 2027. He had commanded the Olubadan to coronate Sharafadeen and two others as part of the lesser obas in the city, a very unpopular thing among the indigenes. Sharafadeen and his two colleagues Obas had refused to attend the coronation, giving excuses, but Seyi Makinde went ahead, absenting himself but sending his deputy to do the coronation. The scheme is that Sharafadeen cannot be an oba and politician at the same time. How the government thinks it could coronate the obas that have no traditional bearing with the obas concerned, who were not in attendance, and whose governor also didn’t attend is a bitter pill to swallow.
It may look odd to the indigenes of Ibadan; it may look odd to Oba Ladoja and to his council of chiefs, but not to Seyi Makinde. Seyi Makinde is ambitious; he wants to be vice president to Atiku Abubakar. He has pledged to deliver Oyo State to Atiku and allegedly promised 10 billion naira as a gift. People are saying this money will come from the Oyo State purse, where the governor has been spending freely in recent weeks. A top-weight politician told this reporter that Seyi Makinde bought 351 cars for all the councillors in the state, for 26 million naira each, and power bikes for all the ward chairmen in the state who are not in the employ of the government, at 6 million naira a bike. The politician said Seyi Makinde was just trying to justify spending the huge money now available to him as part of the Tinubu largesse after he removed the subsidy on oil.
Sharafadeen Alli, the APC consensus candidate for the Oyo governorship contest who is at the center of the crisis also accused the governor, Seyi Makinde of spending 1.5 billion naira on the failed coronation. He said the purpose of what he called wasteful spending is not for the coronation but for Seyi Makinde to make an expenditure in order to allegedly pilfer money he will use for the 2027 elections. Seyi Makinde was suspected to be angling to coronate Sharafadeen Alli so as to edge him out of the gubernatorial contest. The Oyo state law is that an oba cannot participate in politics.
Could Oba Ladoja be part of a plot to impeach a governor who is almost at the end of his tenure? He himself having suffered that indignity when he was governor of the state, an indignity he suffered in the hand of a totalitarian power monger, Olusegun Obasanjo, president between 1999 and 2007. Nothing is beyond politicians in the pursuit of their selfish interests. Oba Ladoja may want to be grateful to Tinubu, who sponsored his legal defense from the High Court to the Supreme Court in his impeachment, a case Ladoja won. Tinubu, now having offended Nigerians with his harsh and inhumane policies, is hell-bent on winning a second term by all means. So Ladoja is a nice catch for him to win all Yoruba states to counterbalance the North East and North West who are pushing their people to punish Tinubu with their votes because he has cut them off from their traditional means of making money through government appointments denied to them.
Currently, two Yoruba states are not in the hands of the APC, Oyo and Osun states. Osun is difficult because the governor of the state is loved by the people, having been seen to have performed. So Oyo State is a battle that Tinubu must win. Seyi Makinde, rather than deploy resources to electricity and quality education, has neglected these vital areas and goes on populist programs like payment of salaries and pensions, which are good and a must, but electricity and education will guarantee the development and the future of the state. He could do both, but he has decided to concentrate on one and store up money for his vice presidential ambitions in 2027.
What about Mrs. Ajimobi? Nobody should put anything beyond her. She has just been appointed an ambassador to Austria, and she will want to show gratitude to President Tinubu for the appointment as well as revenge for the defeat of the candidate of her late husband in the 2023 election. The winner of that election was Seyi Makinde. Whatever the reason, the state is bigger than anybody, and a collapse of it is dangerous to all politicians. If they keep this in mind, they will prevent a repeat of the calamity that Akintola engineered through his unbridled ambition. If they don’t, the nation will suffer once again.
First Published in METRO
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Tunde Akande is both a journalist and pastor. He earned a Master's degree in Mass Communication from the University of Lagos.
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