By Adebayo Osonuga, Manchester
I have read Segun Olatunji’s rather agitated response to my intervention, and I must confess that I am less offended by his sneering references to Manchester and British tea than I am bemused by the sheer indigence of his analysis. To be lectured on Ogun soil by a man who has clearly mistaken proximity to power for political intelligence is an experience that requires a measured reply.
Mr. Olatunji catalogues, with almost evangelical zeal, 150 transformers, sewing machines, deep freezers and laptops as evidence of Senator Adeola’s unprecedented scorecard, and then triumphantly asks when last Otunba Gbenga Daniel or Senator Ibikunle Amosun touched lives on such a scale.
Permit me, from this cold Manchester vantage point, to educate him on a distinction that should be elementary to any serious observer. Daniel and Amosun are former Governors, that is, managers of an entire state budget and architects of institutions.
To compare the distribution of block-moulding machines procured through legislative constituency funds to the establishment of Tai Solarin University of Education, the Agro-Cargo Airport, or the massive road and housing revolution that defined the Amosun era, is to commit a category error that would not survive an undergraduate viva in my university here.
Transformers are not legacy, Mr. Olatunji. They are consumables. Empowerment bazaars are the oldest pre-gubernatorial ritual in our politics. They do not confer administrative capacity, and to present them as having silenced critics is to insult the very sophisticated electorate you claim to defend.
His treatment of my concern about the Lagos Model is even more intellectually dishonest. He dismisses it as the funniest joke of all and reduces my argument to horror at efficiency. That is a deliberate misreading.
My anxiety, which I articulated clearly, was never about whether Lagos works. It is about whether Ogun State should import a political model predicated on the concentration of power in a single extra-constitutional benefactor, where party leadership, market revenues and candidacy become the private estate of one man.
Ogun State has always been polycentric, competitive, and deeply suspicious of single-man hegemony. I raised a legitimate structural question, and your answer was to count freezers.
Finally, on your persistent obsession with my location. The ad hominem reference to Manchester is the weakest device in your essay. It is a circumstantial fallacy that seeks to discredit an argument by attacking the geography of its author.
Let me remind you that the diaspora you mock remits billions of naira annually to sustain the very economies you claim your principal has revived. We in Manchester may sip British tea, but we also fund school fees, hospital bills and businesses back home in Ogun State. Our distance does not invalidate our stake.
Indeed, by your logic, you yourself, writing from what is clearly the vantage point of the Senator’s media office, are equally disqualified by proximity to patronage.
In the final analysis, Mr. Olatunji, your defence does not rescue Senator Yayi; it inadvertently confirms my thesis. When a governorship project can only be defended by counting deep freezers and mocking a citizen for living abroad, rather than by articulating a coherent vision for industrialization, debt sustainability and civil service reform, it proves that what you herald as the dawn of deliverables is in fact the dusk of ideas.
I remain, a concerned son of Ogun State who can distinguish between a benefactor and a governor.