By Kunle Somorin
History, as the venerable English historian Thomas Carlyle once postulated, is ultimately shaped by the interplay of persistent preparation and the sudden, unyielding turns of fate.
In the fastidious arena of Nigerian democratic contestation, where political careers are routinely made or unmade at the stroke of an administrative pen, the electoral landscape of Ogun State has just witnessed a seismic reconfiguration.
The release of the Independent National Electoral Commission’s final candidates list for the upcoming February 6 poll did not merely refine the contest; it fundamentally altered the gravitational laws of the Gateway State.
With the dramatic administrative disqualification of the Peoples Democratic Party flagbearer, Hon. Oladipupo Adebutu – whose campaign foundered upon the unyielding rocks of statutory compliance – the long-anticipated battle for Oke Mosan has dissolved into what looks unmistakably like a clear corridor for Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, universally known as Yayi.
To observe the swift collapse of the opposition’s vanguard is to witness a classic lesson in political vanity. For over two decades, the Adebutu political machine operated under the comfortable delusion that inherited wealth and periodic electoral vanity projects could substitute for systemic party building and rigorous legislative stewardship.
His endless quest for the governorship had long assumed the tragicomic quality of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the rocky heights of Olumo Rock, only to watch it inevitably slip from his grasp. Adebutu’s protracted struggle was defined less by ideological conviction than by an entrenched sense of elite entitlement – a belief that the governorship was a family birthright waiting to be claimed.
Yet, as the proverb wisely admonish: one does not gauge the readiness of meat merely by its outer appearance. While Adebutu spent years navigating internal party squabbles, procedural blunders, and endless litigation, he failed to erect a resilient, legally watertight institutional apparatus capable of surviving the basic rigours of electoral regulation.
His ultimate undoing by the fine print of the Electoral Act is not an act of political sabotage; it is the natural culmination of a long, chaotic campaign built upon shifting sand.
In stark, deliberate contrast stands Senator Olamilekan Adeola, whose trajectory reads like a masterclass in pragmatic political investment and calculated expansion.
Long before the INEC guidelines excised his chief antagonist from the ballot, Yayi had already redefined the parameters of representation across Ogun State.
Critics and political opponents once sought to tether him to a catalog of whispers, weaponising regional parochialism and dredges of past legislative disputes to question his lineage and motives. Yet, in politics as in life, performance is the ultimate antidote to prejudice.
Rather than engaging in the toxic mudslinging that so often characterises sub-national politics, Yayi adopted the philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli, who observed that true authority is preserved through tangible virtue and visible beneficence. His systematically executed strategy was disarmingly simple: weaponise development.
Across the length and breadth of Ogun State – from the industrial hubs of Ado-Odo/Ota to the agricultural stretches of Yewa, through the historic precincts of Abeokuta and down to the coastal fringes of Ijebu – Yayi unleashed an infrastructural and human capital intervention of unprecedented proportions.
Transformers were planted in long-neglected rural corridors, primary health centres were rehabilitated, tertiary scholarships were distributed by the thousands, and massive road interventions were facilitated through legislative appropriations. He treated non-constituents with the same administrative urgency as his immediate constituency in Ogun West, effectively building a cross-zonal movement that transcended traditional senatorial fault lines. By the time the political establishment began to take stock of his ambitions, Yayi had entrenched himself in the daily livelihoods of the common folk.
Consequently, the lingering inquisitions regarding his past and the tired campaigns of calumny simply evaporated under the heat of his sheer productivity. The voter on the street of Sagamu or Ilaro is rarely persuaded by abstract political philosophy; they care deeply about illuminated streets, functional clinics, and economic empowerment.
Yayi provided all three in abundance. As the old Latin maxim goes, Res ipsa loquitur – the thing speaks for itself.
As the political machinery prepares for the February 6 election, the road to the executive house at Oke Mosan appears remarkably unobstructed. The opposition front lies in a state of irreversible fragmentation, reduced to post-mortem legal gambits that arrive far too late to sway an electorate that has already moved on.
The traditional fault lines that once split Ogun politics along rigid regional lines have been softened by Yayi’s broad-based, inclusive coalition, which seamlessly unites the political interests of the East, Central, and West.
Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola is not merely riding a wave of political good fortune following an opponent’s administrative error. He is harvesting the yield of years of deliberate, calculated, and generous political investment. When the voters turn out on February 6, they will not be participating in a tense, nail-biting thriller. Instead, they will be ratifying a process whose conclusion was written months ago in the concrete, asphalt, and human lives transformed by a politician who understood that the shortest path to power is paved with genuine service to the people.
Yes, Oke Mosan awaits its master builder.
*Somorin is a veteran journalist