Understanding Akogun Oyedepo

Rafiu Ajakaye 

Firebrand politician Akogun Iyiola Oyedepo is known for what he does. He is a man whose credibility is best defined by the roles he played in the last hours of the 2023 election as he abandoned his Social Democratic Party (SDP) compatriots mid sea to cut deals with different political interests. 

Before the election, he spared no pejorative to describe the government of Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, including manufacturing revenue data (intentionally so) to manipulate the public. He would later eat his words when he praised the same governor for being such a large-hearted statesman who earned his second term on the back of excellent performance and the temperament to manage the tantrums of his ilks.

The above offers a fair glimpse into the person of Akogun, a man who likes to be called the irrepressible five-star General of the Otoge battle. Bitter for not getting enough patronage, he was on Channels TV on Friday night to again attack the governor and market his new mercenary endeavour. 

As he struggled with vile political platitudes to mask his real intentions, anchor Seun Okinbaloye asked him to discuss governance in Kwara since 2019. 

Akogun then made two false claims: that Kwara remains 80% dependent on federal allocation (a euphemism that the economy has been stagnant) and that things have remained the same, including in education and healthcare delivery. 

It is a lie. By many verifiable accounts, including BudgIT, Kwara is one of the states that can easily discharge their monthly obligations without waiting on federal allocation. New GDP computation jointly done by the NBS and SBS shows that the state economy has grown steadily under Abdulrazaq, peaking at 11.52% (growth rate) in 2022. Importantly, the report said this growth was fuelled largely by government’s investment and support for agric, enterprise, and services. At N3.9 trillion (GDP), the report revealed that the state economy is one of the largest in Northern Nigeria. 

From its wrecked state in 2019, including being on the UBEC backlist between 2014 and 2019, basic education and primary healthcare have improved significantly as recent testimonies show. UBEC Executive Secretary, Dr. Hamid Bobboyi, said Kwara is now a leading state in basic education. Kwara has won the national presidential debate for three times in a row, while its KwaraLEARN programme shows unprecedented progress in basic literacy and numeracy skills. On Thursday night, December 12, the state emerged as the best state in North-central in basic healthcare for the second time in two years. 

Along with massive facility upgrades, the government recently hired 1,005 health professionals, including medical doctors, nurses, and midwives, to strengthen healthcare delivery at the grassroots. While every society continues to evolve in gaps of development, Akogun cannot claim a relapse in the standing of Kwara. 

Seun could not have believed Akogun’s fairy tales about Kwara. He has reasons not to, even though he (Seun) is based in Abuja. A proud son of Oko, Seun must have read that the Oko Omu Aran Road has been fixed by Abdulrazaq, making the hitherto tortuous journey along that corridor a smooth one. 

Further down that axis is the failed antiquated Orisa bridge (Oro Ago), which the governor has also replaced with a newly built bridge, more than 50 years after the colonialists built it. Located in the same area, the Oro General Hospital was recently renovated on a comprehensive scale by the same governor, more than 45 years after it was built. This is the story of Kwara, not the fables of Akogun Iyiola Oyedepo. 

Echoing PDP’s goofballs, Akogun said fences are being erected to displace people — a veiled criticism of the efforts of the government to restore law and order in the capital city. This assertion, and many others attributed to Akogun, proves the ‘transparency problem’ in human psychology; in other words, our strategies for dealing with strangers, or humans generally, are deeply flawed. Transparency, a theory from the thinking of Charles Darwin, is the idea that people’s behaviour or demeanour — the way they represent themselves on the outside — provides an authentic and reliable window into the way they feel on the inside. 

People mostly mistook Akogun for a progressive who simply wanted a greater Kwara where things are properly done for better outcomes. We are wrong. This transparency problem has proven costly in history. Former British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain once claimed profound knowledge of Adolf Hitler to the extent that he misjudged him to act on his words. Chamberlain was grossly mistaken as Hitler acted exactly contrary to the assumption of the British leader. 

This is what we have repeatedly seen in Akogun. The urban renewal project of the administration has proven critical as Ilorin steadily succumbed to the excesses of human behaviour when not checked. From the Ahmadu Bello Way, Post Office, and Challenge to Oja Oba, nobody respected land use laws and setbacks anymore to the extent that ‘paraga’ (locally made gin and concoction) joints were already springing up everywhere and going out in the evening, even on the Ahmadu Bello Way, was becoming a nightmare. Young girls were being harassed everywhere, especially at the Post Office and Challenge axis. The urban renewal has instantly reversed the ugly trend as the government massively upgraded the infrastructure in a way never seen in the last 40 years, pushed back the encroachments, and reclaimed setbacks. This is what Akogun and PDP’s kamikazes have politicized. 

Not only has the governor bested his predecessors in infrastructure development and turnaround of Ilorin, he has in fact shown leadership in how he handled projects that he inherited from his predecessors— a quality we know to be lacking in many leaders, including Senator Bukola Saraki whose boys now bleat around. 

From the new secretariat to the Osi and Ilesha campuses of the state university, the governor made sure the state does not become a mortuary of abandoned projects. Between 2003 and 2019, Saraki’s hegemony abandoned projects of his predecessor such as the main auditorium of the Kwara Polytechnic, water projects, and hostels that the Mohammed Lawal regime had started.

In prudence, the iconic Revenue House, likely the tallest building in North-central today, attests to how the Abdulrazaq administration has ensured that humongous commissions to consultants in the former administration are instead spent on building a legacy structure of massive economic importance.

Tens of thousands of people are productively engaged across different construction sites in the state, including in the capital city Ilorin. If anyone calls projects and programmes like the garment factory, innovation hub, Shea butter factory, Patigi Motel, sugar factory film studio, industrial park, remodeled Kwara Hotel, agro-processing zone, international conference centre, an inexhaustible list of rural and urban roads, and a few others a white elephant, you can tell where they belong: a band of traditional politicians whose understanding of public good and development is what they get as personal gains or things that appeal to their individual egos. A good side of democracy is that leaders must put up with such persons as the spice of life. Such is the lot of Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq.

▪︎ Mr. Ajakaye is Chief Press Secretary to the Governor of Kwara State