FROM OBASANJO-ERA ASPIRANT TO 2025 LAUGHING STOCK: DAPO’S REFUGEE RHETORIC HITS NEW LOW

By A.R. Olanrewaju

In the sun-baked splendour of Iworo-Ogbogbo-Igbeba Road yesterday, Governor Prince Dapo Abiodun found his voice, and what a voice it was. Commissioning yet another ribbon of asphalt in Ijebu North-East, he turned from praising President Tinubu’s infrastructure blitz to issuing a chilling political fatwa: former Governors Otunba Gbenga Daniel (OGD) and Senator Ibikunle Amosun, he thundered, would soon be reduced to “refugee status” in the very state they once superintended. “You will all end up in IDP camps,” he warned those sponsoring criticisms or litigation, adding for good measure that neither man, not even in their combined 16 years, built as many roads as he has in his own tenure.

One almost stood up and applauded the sheer theatrical flair. Almost.
Because if political irony were an Olympic sport, Prince Dapo Abiodun would have just taken gold while still lacing his shoes. Here is a man who has nursed gubernatorial ambitions since the Obasanjo presidency, that is, since the early 2000s when OGD was remodeling Ogun State and Amosun was cutting his teeth as a senator. For sixteen long years he watched from the wings as two colossi reshaped Ogun State, one brick, one policy, one federal alliance at a time. Then, in 2015, when he finally stepped into the arena for the Ogun East senatorial ticket, the result was not victory but a resounding, almost poetic defeat to the late Buruji Kasamu, a loss so comprehensive the courts had to affirm it twice.

Yet the gods of Ogun politics, in their infinite mischief, were not done with the script. In 2019, it was OGD, the same “refugee” now threatened with internal displacement, who opened his formidable structure and directed foot soldiers to labour tirelessly for Abiodun’s narrow victory. Fast-forward to 2023, and another heavyweight, Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola (Yayi), lent the decisive weight that carried the incumbent across the finish line once more. The student had become governor, but only because the masters had first cleared the path.

Now, with barely a year left in his second and final term, the same governor who once needed these “lightweights” to survive is promising to consign them to political oblivion. The audacity is breathtaking. OGD and Amosun are not political apprentices; they are institutions. One built institutions that still define Ogun’s industrial corridor; the other delivered federal muscle that reshaped the state’s fiscal architecture and left indelible footprints in the National Assembly. Their influence stretches from the creeks of Ogun East to the corridors of Aso Rock. To call them refugees is not just hyperbole, it is the political equivalent of a man standing on his father’s shoulders and claiming he can see farther than the old man.

But the real comedy lies in the timing. Whispers from the Presidency, loud enough to be heard in every ward in Ogun, suggest President Tinubu is determined to ensure sitting federal lawmakers who delivered for the Renewed Hope agenda are returned in 2027. Translation: the Ogun East senatorial ticket that Governor Abiodun may have quietly coveted is already spoken for. The battle, it seems, was lost before the first shot was fired. While OGD consolidates grassroots support through the BATOGD movement and continues to champion Tinubu’s re-election, the man threatening to turn him into a refugee is left commissioning roads and issuing threats that sound increasingly like the last roar of a lion whose pride has already moved on.

This is not the time for lavish parties or more grandiloquent declarations. Popularity ratings are dipping faster than the Sagamu Interchange during rush hour. The last twelve months of this administration offer a final window, not to reduce predecessors to refugees, but to deliver the kind of legacy-defining projects that make critics eat their words and voters queue behind you in gratitude.

Because in Ogun politics, the real refugees are those who mistake borrowed time for divine right, and inherited structures for personal conquest. The titans built empires. The student is still trying to prove he belongs in the classroom. And the clock, dear Governor, is ticking louder than any commissioning siren.

The stage is set. The audience is watching. Let the real performance begin.