Jelili Ariyibi
If asked what I want for Christmas, I would opt, without a second thought, for the chance to slam the faces of Ogun State governors from 1999 to date into the effluent and maggot-rich back of a waste disposal truck.
I know that this is extreme, if not a deranged choice at any time of the year, let alone at Yuletide. Still, Olusegun Osoba, Gbenga Daniel, Ibikunle Amosun and Dapo Abiodun deserve much worse because their administrations functioned or functions in somewhat deranged ways.
Abiodun, the incumbent, is the subject of ongoing wounding assessments by almost everybody apart from his media team (and possibly his wife and children) over the dire state of roads across the state. Social media is a procession of reels that expose the failure. Some of the most watched were produced, curiously, by a church in Ijoko, a town whose name should be shorthand for criminal neglect. The star of those reels, a cleric with traffic warden energy, narrates the suffering of residents across the state.
The visuals are so convicting that they suggest Abiodun and those before him regard the people as children of a lesser god. One reel after another has gone viral and forced official rebuttals. Abiodun has posted his own reels showing ongoing construction, but the flood of citizen footage is overwhelming. Comments on his clips have been overwhelmingly hostile, many branding him the worst governor in the state’s history, a title Amosun has won for keeps.
Abiodun accuses opponents of weaponising bad roads for political gain. He may be right. I suspect the Ijoko campaign is astroturfed. He would do the same if the boot were on the other foot. He also blames predecessors. He is right. The damage is cumulative. Osoba, who served one term, is the least culpable but left nothing remarkable except his fondness for adire.
Gbenga Daniel promised transformation and delivered roads that went bad faster than a G string falls off a stripper. That is an exaggeration, but Ishashi Road, built under his administration, failed within six months. The bridge on that road lost form as if made of plasticine before collapsing. Communities along the Lagos Ogun boundary remember buses stranded and tyres swallowed by mud.
Then came Ibikunle Amosun, whose psychopath-adjacent administration developed an obsession with six lane highways and grand bridges that served ego more than need. Those monuments, which led to the demolition of homes and livelihoods, now rot where they stand. Abiodun inherited a catalogue of half life infrastructure and has done little to improve it. That is the story.
The Olusegun Osoba Road linking Iju in Lagos to Agbado in Ogun was commissioned in 2022. It is already cratering. Ishashi Road, built two years ago, and Buba Marwa Road, completed last year, are following the same route to ruin. Across the state, roads crumble like chalk in the rain. The Itele Ayobo Lafenwa corridor has become a motorist’s nightmare. Every part of the state is a recurring tragedy of palliatives that never last.
The complaints are not statistics; they are voices of people who live inside the failure. From Magboro to Ijoko to Ota to Ifo to Ijebu down to Abeokuta, citizens know their governors build roads for cameras not for commuters. Every new administration inherits potholes and manufactures fresh ones.
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Public assessments place Ogun among the worst performing states for road quality, citing vehicle damage, traffic delays and rising accident rates. Civil groups and youth organisations have begged the governor to build for durability not decoration. His government responds with spreadsheets, photo shoots and blame.
The pattern is clear. Successive administrations prefer spectacle over substance. They dualise roads to applause and abandon maintenance to the rains. They build bridges that lead nowhere and neglect the arteries that drive commerce. The result is a state where progress is seasonal and asphalt dies young.
If Abiodun can persuade the public that the state now has a new campus of well built roads while the ones residents use belong to the old campus, his boast that he is building roads will make sense. Until then, like his predecessors, he is doing nothing. His face belongs in the back of that waste truck with the other men who left Ogun’s roads to rot and its people to suffer.
Culled from the FBP of Festus Akanbi
