By Adebayo Osonuga, Manchester
The political trajectory of Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, alias YAYI, reveals a pattern that is less about service delivery and more about hegemonic consolidation, a calculated attempt to exterminate the existing political structures in Ogun State in his desperate quest to become the next Jagaban.
1. The Politics of Erasure: A War Against Legacies
Senator Yayi’s ambition cannot coexist with the towering political legacies of Otunba Gbenga Daniel (OGD) and Senator Ibikunle Amosun (SIA). Both men represent entrenched, organic political movements in Ogun State, OGD with his Ogun East/Yewa-leaning liberal structure and SIA with his unassailable APC base in Ogun Central. For Yayi, whose origin and political foothold remain subjects of intense public contestation, their existence is an existential threat.
His strategy, therefore, is not competition but erasure. By deploying enormous financial inducements and federal patronage, he seeks to dismantle their loyal structures, buy over their foot-soldiers, and render the two former governors politically irrelevant. It is not a contest of ideas; it is a hostile takeover.
2. From Representation to Imposition: The Lagos Model
The concept of “Jagaban” in contemporary Nigerian politics connotes not just leadership, but totalitarian control, a system where one man determines who gets what, when, and how. This is the model Senator Yayi intends to import and replicate in Ogun State.
The desperation is evident: a sitting Senator representing Ogun West who has spent the majority of his legislative years in Lagos suddenly seeks to define the political destiny of an entire state. The attempt to retire OGD and Amosun is not about generational shift; it is about creating a political vacuum that only he, with his war chest, can fill. It is the classic godfather strategy, eliminate all independent power centres so that loyalty flows only in one direction.
3. The Paradox of a Borrowed Base
What makes this desperation more profound is its sociological fragility. OGD and Amosun, for all their political differences, are organic products of Ogun State. Their families, their burial grounds, their childhoods, and their political baptisms are rooted in the state.
Yayi, on the other hand, struggles to reconcile his acclaimed Yewa identity with the glaring reality that his entire ancestral footprint, as confessed by himself, father buried in Alimosho, mother in VGC, grandmother in Ikeja, is in Lagos. A man who could not entrust his own parents to the soil of Yewa now wants to own the political soil of Ogun State. In that contradiction lies the desperation: to end OGD and Amosun is to end the voices that constantly remind the electorate of this fundamental question of belonging.
4. The Imperative of Rejection: Ogun Must Not Harbour a Serpent
This is where the vigilance of the Ogun people becomes non-negotiable. What is being presented is a serpentine political nature, one that coils around existing structures, not to strengthen them, but to asphyxiate them. It smiles during the day while plotting extinction at night.
Ogun State, a citadel of enlightenment and political sophistication, must not give room for such predatory politics. This Machiavellian tendency to liquidate fellow leaders in pursuit of absolute dominance is alien to our ethos of collective leadership and mutual respect. It must be unequivocally rejected at the polls, in discourse, and in conscience.
To allow it is to mortgage our political future to a man who sees Ogun not as a homeland to be developed, but as a conquered territory to be possessed.
Ultimately, Senator Yayi’s project is not about building Ogun State; it is about owning it. The plot to end OGD and Amosun is the necessary first chapter in the manual of every aspiring Jagaban, crush all alternative centres of power, monetize loyalty, and crown yourself as the sole authority.
Ogun State, however, has never been a state that submits to one man. It is a state of Awolowos, of Abiolas, of assertive elders and independent thinkers. That history, if we reject this serpent nature now, will be his greatest undoing.