Last Friday was the first anniversary of the passage of Rotimi Akeredolu, ex-Ondo State governor. It was also the first anniversary of his successor, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, in office. We thus must be grateful to Aiyedatiwa for immortalising Akeredolu, famously known as Aketi that same day. Aketi was an ecumenical spirit – borrowing from Wole Soyinka’s burial oration for Chief Bola Ige. Aside from naming a court after Aketi, Aiyedatiwa organised a lecture in the former NBA president’s remembrance.
Stubbornly courageous, Aketi cared not whose ox got gored while he spoke his mind. You could be president or an emperor; Aketi brought out the muck in your eye, in your very before. I once wrote against his government’s stoppage of an ancient traditional festival in Akure, the state capital and asked him why he didn’t do same to the Igogo festival in his Owo country home. He had just lost his mother and I called thereafter to commiserate with him but he used the occasion to spank me. He told me I was talking nonsense and tutored me on what he called the security implication of allowing the festival. Till he died, his sobriquet for me was “Akure l’o kan” – it is the turn of Akure. Not minding him being my elderly friend, I didn’t support his governorship. I supported his opponent who was my kinsman. And he knew. But Aketi was indeed a great man.
Though the people of the state capital believed he preferenced his Owo home in infrastructure more than the state capital and that he disdained Akure and its monarchy, Aketi had some quite ambitious projects earmarked for the capital. Unfortunately, he couldn’t complete them.
When last week, one of Aiyedatiwa’s aides, Kikelomo Isijola, took to the media, on the anniversary of the governor’s first year in office, to commend him for some infrastructural projects she claimed her boss had pulled through, she received barbs severally from people who saw her effort as whitewashing a dirty boulder. Many people hold that, in the last 25 years of democratic governance, Ondo State has been extremely unlucky in the hands of its governors. Except under Olusegun Agagu and Olusegun Mimiko where the state received infrastructural lifting, the state is generally perceived to be backward development-wise. While the state collects one of the hugest federal revenues as an oil-producing state, its capital city is one of the most underdeveloped in the Southwest. Ado-Ekiti, which became capital about three decades ago, is rated far more developed than Akure.
During his swearing-in, Aiyedatiwa promised to complete the projects left by Aketi. One of these is the Oda-Ijoka dualization project in Akure, The uncompleted projects, according to Aiyedatiwa, would receive urgent attention. He specifically mentioned Oba Osupa–Oluwatuyi–Ijoka (Akure) dualisation, completion of Oda dual carriage (Akure), completion of Akure flyover (Onyearugbulem-Shagari-Irese), construction of 15.89km selected roads in Ondo township among many others. A year after, none of them has been completed. Even Isijola claimed the projects are 60% completed, many of them almost six years after. The state football team has been playing its home matches in Ijebu-Ode, Ogun State, due to the infrastructural horror that the state’s stadium is. The internal roads in Akure are in impassable conditions with no modern developmental strides befitting of a state capital in the city.
If it is reckoned that, were Aketi to be alive, his joint ticket with Aiyedatiwa would expire in two months’ time for another government to take over, those projects would automatically have been abandoned projects.
Aiyedatiwa should make the people of Ondo state joyful as he vividly was immediately he heard of the passage of his boss. Office goes beyond the grandeur surrounding it; it entails responsibility and working for the people.
