Ogun 2027: The wrong ballot question

There is something quite disturbing about the way we discuss elections in Nigeria. We speak of democracy as though the ballot were the final destination, when in truth it is only the doorway. What follows is the government that enters through it, the decisions it makes, the priorities it sets and the lives it touches. Elections are, therefore, not simply contests over who occupies the Government House. They are arguments about what kind of society we want to inhabit.

Nigeria’s democracy is still a work in progress, as are many democracies around the world. But our particular weakness is that elections too often become exercises in choosing between personalities, structures and political calculations rather than competing visions of government. The language of “lesser evil” has become so familiar that we sometimes forget the more important question: lesser than what, and better for whom?

Ogun State is approaching another of those defining moments. The 2027 governorship election is still months away, but the political weather has already changed. The Independent National Electoral Commission has fixed the governorship and State House of Assembly elections for February 6, 2027, and the contest in Ogun is increasingly being shaped by the emergence of Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, popularly known as Yayi, as the All Progressives Congress candidate, and Oladipupo Adebutu, commonly known as Lado, as the Peoples Democratic Party candidate.

These are not political neophytes. Adeola represented Alimosho in the House of Representatives, served as chairman of the House Committee on Public Accounts from 2011 to 2015, represented Lagos West in the Senate from 2015 to 2023, and has represented Ogun West in the Senate since 2023. He is a chartered accountant and has spent much of his political career within the legislature.

Adebutu comes from a different political tradition. His public career stretches back to the Third Republic, when he was elected to the National Assembly in 1992 to represent Remo Federal Constituency on the platform of the Social Democratic Party. He subsequently returned to elective politics and represented the Remo Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives from 2015 to 2019. He has also been involved in business and agriculture for decades, with his political identity deeply rooted in Remo.

However, the campaign already threatens to become a referendum on matters that may have little to do with the quality of governance. The loudest of these concerns Adeola’s ancestry. His critics, including Adebutu and PDP chieftain Folake Marcus-Bello, have gone beyond the general claim that he is not an indigene of Ogun; they have specifically alleged that he is in fact from Ekiti State, and have challenged him to produce documentary evidence of his Ogun roots. Adeola’s supporters reject the allegation and have publicly identified him as an indigene of Ago-Isaga in Ilaro. The dispute has now escalated into a threatened legal confrontation. These are political claims and counterclaims; until competent authorities or a court resolves any specific legal dispute, they should remain precisely that: claims, not established facts.

There is also a constitutional point that should not be buried beneath the political noise. Section 177 of the 1999 Constitution, as amended, lists the qualifications for election as governor: Nigerian citizenship by birth, a minimum age of 35, membership and sponsorship by a political party, and education to at least school certificate level or its equivalent. It does not list “indigene of the state” as a separate qualification.

That does not make questions of identity, belonging or rootedness irrelevant to voters. Ogun is a state with a powerful consciousness of ancestry, town, clan and cultural belonging. A voter is entitled to ask whether a candidate understands the history, aspirations and peculiarities of the people he seeks to govern. But there is a difference between a legitimate political question about rootedness and an assertion of legal disqualification. The former belongs to political judgment. The latter requires evidence and law.

Then comes the counterargument against Adebutu: that he is from Iperu, the same town as the incumbent governor, Dapo Abiodun. The argument is politically intelligible. Supporters of the Ogun West cause, for example, have repeatedly framed the 2027 contest as an opportunity to address the fact that the senatorial district has never produced a democratically elected governor since Ogun State was created. Critics of Adebutu have argued that another Iperu candidate would perpetuate an existing concentration of political power.

But again, political convenience should not be confused with constitutional law. There is no constitutional provision barring a candidate from succeeding another governor from the same town. Whether Ogun voters consider such continuity desirable is a political question for the electorate. It cannot be converted into a constitutional prohibition that does not exist.

This is where the conversation ought to become more difficult. If Ogun’s 2027 election is reduced to “Ogun for Ogun”, the state owes itself an honest answer to a harder question: what should decide a governorship when ancestry, competence and geographic fairness pull in different directions? My own answer is unfashionable but defensible. Rootedness should weigh on a candidate’s understanding of the state; it should not override a candidate’s demonstrated capacity to govern it. A brilliant administrator with thin local roots and a well-rooted candidate with a thin record of delivery are not equally qualified simply because one satisfies an ancestry test the constitution never imposed. Competence should carry the greater weight, provided the candidate can show, through record rather than rhetoric, that he understands the state he seeks to lead.

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Aristotle wrote in Politics that human beings are “by nature political animals”. His point was not that politics is an endless carnival of partisan combat. He understood political community as the arena in which human beings deliberate about justice, advantage and the good life. That is precisely what Ogun risks forgetting.

The electorate should be asking what Yayi and Lado intend to do with Ogun’s industrial base, its rapidly expanding urban centres, its agricultural economy, its education system, its health infrastructure, its transport networks, and its relationship with Lagos. They should be asking how either candidate proposes to expand internally generated revenue without strangling businesses, attract investment without surrendering public interest, create jobs beyond political appointments, and improve the quality of life beyond the familiar spectacle of commissioning ceremonies.

They should ask what each candidate has actually done with the public authority already entrusted to him. Legislative records, constituency interventions, executive experience, business records, public statements, and policy proposals can all be examined. Political biography should not be treated as decoration. It should be interrogated as evidence.

It is worth remembering, too, that Ogun’s ballot on February 6 will not carry only two names. Other parties will field candidates of their own, and a democracy is diminished whenever the scale of two war chests convinces the public that a general election is really a two-man theatre. Money can purchase visibility. It has never, by itself, demonstrated governing capacity, and the electorate does itself a disservice by forgetting that the ballot is wider than the loudest billboards suggest.

There is a warning here that George Orwell understood rather well. In Animal Farm, political language becomes a weapon through which slogans gradually replace thought. Politics has always been noisy; that is not new. What is dangerous is subtler: repetition eventually makes an argument sound like a fact, and once a slogan is repeated often enough, citizens stop asking whether it is true.

Ogun must resist that temptation. “Indigene.” “Outsider.” “Continuation.” “Zoning.” “Competence.” “Money.” These words will dominate the campaign. Each contains a legitimate political question. None should become a substitute for the harder work of examining records and programmes.

The state does not need a governor who simply belongs to the right place. It needs a government that understands the right problems. It does not need a candidate who can win every argument on television. It needs an administration capable of turning policy into roads, schools, healthcare, jobs, security, industrial growth and a functioning public service.

The people of Ogun must, therefore, resist the temptation to treat 2027 as a coronation of ancestry or a continuation of political entitlement. A governor is not elected to represent his hometown. He is elected to govern an entire state.

The contest between Yayi and Lado will undoubtedly generate more accusations, counteraccusations, alliances, defections and political drama before the votes are counted. That is the nature of Nigerian politics. But beneath the drama sits a more consequential question, one that neither pocket depth, machinery, family tree nor grievance about marginalisation can answer: what does each candidate actually intend to build? The people should demand more than a choice between familiar names; they should demand evidence, programmes, records and accountability to match it.

For in the end, elections do not manufacture the consequences of leadership. They transfer the authority to create them. And when the dust settles in 2027, Ogun will still be here, carrying whatever government its people choose to give themselves.

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