Your Excellencies,
The above subject refers.
I write this open letter not merely as an observer of our state’s political trajectory, but as a deeply concerned stakeholder of the Yewa nation who refuses to watch our collective heritage mortgaged to the highest bidder on the altar of Cabal expediency. This communication comes at a critical juncture in the history of Ogun State, specifically as the political machinery begins to grind toward the 2027 gubernatorial transition.
First and foremost, the entire Yewa nation owes both of you an immeasurable, eternal debt of gratitude. History will forever record your unprecedented personal, financial, and political sacrifices in attempting to break the long-standing, 50-year governorship jinx that has structurally marginalized our region since the creation of Ogun State in 1976. We vividly and appreciatively remember when Otunba Gbenga Daniel spent billions of Naira in a monumental, systematic effort to install a native Yewa son, Gboyega Nasir Isiaka (GNI). Similarly, we remember when Senator Ibikunle Amosun stood firmly behind another worthy Yewa son, Adekunle Akinlade with Billions of Naira , risking his own political capital and defying immense structural pressure from external forces to ensure that our long-sought regional equity was finally realized. Unlike the transactional political merchants dominating our airwaves today, your past interventions were rooted in a genuine, demonstrably native effort to elevate the true sons of our soil. The Omo-oluewons are very grateful to you.
However, we must confront a painful and precise truth about why these noble sacrifices were frustrated. This is not an indictment of the good, everyday people of Ilaro, who share the same dreams of authentic regional development as the rest of Ogun West. Rather, it is an indictment of a predatory, monetarily induced political cabal operating within Ilaro and environs. For decades, this specific self-serving cartel has weaponized its proximity to power to lord itself over the rest of Yewa land, acting as gatekeepers who treat our collective gubernatorial aspirations as a private business venture. Time and again, whenever a unified regional front was established, this cabal would deliberately engineer internal sabotage, bringing out parallel candidates to splinter the Yewa voting bloc, work at cross-purposes, and plunge our collective ambitions into definitive electoral defeat.
Today, the very same cabal that engineered those historical failures is trying to sell our people a fraudulent script that I will tag “Olurin 2.0”. Let us speak plainly, wi konko and discard the diplomatic euphemisms: this phrase is a bitter, sarcastic indictment of this cartel’s historical hypocrisy. In 2011, these elite power brokers aggressively weaponized the late, eminent statesman General Adetunji Olurin as a political proxy to violently dismantle and destroy the legitimate, broadly accepted gubernatorial run of GNI. They did not field Olurin out of love for regional equity; they used his grand name as a dynamic weapon for their wallets and stomachs, dividing our votes and delivering victory to other senatorial districts while leaving Yewa stranded in the political wilderness. They are accepting porridge in exchange for their birthright. These are the Esaus of the moment.
Now, in a twist of profound irony, Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola (popularly known as Yayi) has emerged as the definitive “Olurin 2.0 or Yayi 2.0” depending on the precedence you are using . Once again, the exact same insatiable local cabal that traded our regional dignity in 2011 is invoking a manufactured sense of Yewa solidarity to foist an ambitious outsider upon us. They are using the memory of our struggles to justify a transactional arrangement that serves their private bank accounts while permanently erasing the authentic identity of Ogun West.
To justify this impending imposition, the Ilaro cabal has spun a dangerous narrative that Ogun West somehow owes Senator Yayi a political debt that must be compensated with Oke Mosan. We must completely smash this falsehood. If there was ever a transaction or a debt, it has already been completely settled with interests without any procrastination.
Let us recall the raw, unvarnished history of how Senator Yayi secured his current seat. He did not achieve it through seamless local consensus or indigenous entitlement. Instead, his entry into Ogun West politics was marked by the systematic displacement of our own flesh and blood. Senator Yayi effectively robbed our very own native son—the child of the legendary, late Senator Jonathan Odebiyi—to seize the senatorial ticket. The Odebiyi legacy is foundational to the political consciousness of Yewaland, yet a native heir to that legacy was cast aside to accommodate a wealthy political tourist arriving from Lagos West.
Ogun West gave Yayi our highest legislative platform on a silver platter, sacrificing our own internal political hierarchy to do so. Everything that Yayi has done so far—every transformer distributed, every school built, every market inside schools, every road facilitated, and every strategic project executed based on our share of the national cake—was done strictly to reciprocate our immense gesture for giving him that senate ticket when he had no foundational right to it. Yayi was given a mandate, and Yayi has delivered on his mandate. Case closed.
The books are balanced. The ledger is clean. The people of Ogun West do not owe Yayi a single ounce of further political patronage. We must absolutely refuse to mortgage our entire collective future, our ancestry, and our long-term regional identity just to pay a transactional political debt that has already been paid in full. To be fair, in this transaction, we have overpaid him. However, he can keep the ‘change’. Yewa as a people does not owe Yayi anything. We gave him opportunity to go to Abuja on our behalf and bring our share of the national cake. To be fair to him, he did well. However, because of his ambition, he distributed part of the proceeds beyond Yewa land. The math is clear. We owe him nothing.
To understand the absolute danger of the current Yayi project, we must look backward to the historical blueprint of external exploitation that has continuously plagued our region. Senator Yayi is not the first wealthy outsider to use Yewa as a political laboratory; he is simply the latest and most aggressive iteration of a recurring nightmare.
We must soberly recall the 2015 gubernatorial election cycle, when a prominent and immensely wealthy property developer, Olumide Osunsina (the owner of Megamound Properties), suddenly Yayied on our political landscape. Armed with vast financial resources, Osunsina floated an ambition to run for Governor under the highly emotional banner of the “Yewa Agenda”. He and his handlers , the same Cabal, aggressively, marketed his campaign as a vehicle for Yewa emancipation. His luxurious residences in Apapa, Lagos, and his Megamound hotel in Ibadan became heavily patronized political shrines.
A familiar circle of this Cabal gladly gathered around his wealth, shielding him from scrutiny and validating his claims of Yewa solidarity for their own personal convenience. They told our people that Osunsina was the long-awaited Omo Oluewon who would deliver political power to Ogun West.
Yet, where is Olumide Osunsina today? The ultimate tragedy and mockery of that 2015 project became clear when recent reports exposed his true identity. Olumide Osunsina has now been announced as the Olu-elect of Ifo—the traditional ruler of an entirely separate territory in Egba land!
This is the ultimate, undeniable proof of how strangers systematically colonize our political space. A man who claimed the Yewa identity in 2015 to seek our gubernatorial ticket is today ascending the royal throne of another kingdom entirely outside the geography, history, and political identity of Ogun West. Ifo has absolutely nothing to do with Yewa. Osunsina’s traditional coronation in another land completely strips away the fraudulent veneer of his past “Yewa emancipation” rhetoric, proving that the entire project was nothing but a transactional label deployed exclusively for this cabal to swell their wallets. It was a symbiotic association between Osunsina and this Cabal. They were ready to sell the farm to Osunsina.
The money-induced cabal in Ilaro learned a highly dangerous lesson from the Osunsina cum Yayi 1.0 experiment: they realized that the Yewa Agenda could be packaged, commodified, and rented out to the highest bidder, completely independent of ancestry or longstanding community ties. Senator Yayi’s current 2027 campaign is built entirely on this exact same predatory Osunsina blueprint. Once again, an individual who spent his entire professional and political life expanding his kingdom elsewhere has arrived with a massive war chest, relying on the exact same group of local operators to buy him an ancestral passport. This is the true trajectory of the Yayi 2.0/Olurin 2.0 architecture—a highly transactional agenda that stretches seamlessly from Ifo to Alimosho, and will just as easily pivot to Kaduna tomorrow if the price is right. It exposes the core motive of the Ilaro cabal: a relentless, shameless drive to liquidate foundational local assets and sell off the farm by any means necessary.
The sheer wickedness of this current setup becomes blindingly obvious when contrasted with the immense, agonizing prices both of you paid to champion the true, uncompromised sons of Yewa. The monetarily induced actors singing Yayi’s praises today have forgotten the deep scars borne by those who fought for us with authentic conviction.
Consider the harrowing ordeal of Your Excellency, Otunba Gbenga Daniel. Because of your unyielding resolve to back a real Yewa son in GNI, you were marked by political adversaries and subjected to state-sponsored persecution. You were forced to spend 11 grueling years fighting a malicious Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) trial. The anti-graft agency dragged you through the muds and courts, desperately demanding to know the sources of the staggering resources deployed to bankroll the GNI campaign, attempting to criminalize your executive decisions. You endured over a decade of public humiliation, media trials, and structural harassment—finally securing total acquittal at the Court of Appeal only because the judiciary recognized that you were being prosecuted for non-existent offenses. You were forced to sacrifice your peace, your freedom, and eleven years of your post-gubernatorial life to a relentless legal siege, all simply because you dared to give Yewa a fighting chance
Similarly, look at the brutal price paid by Your Excellency, Senator Ibikunle Amosun for Akinlade, nay, Yewa land. Again, In the 2023 election cycle, Governor Amosun was in the trenches for Yewa Land. Because you stood unshakably behind the authentic Ogun West aspiration by championing Biyi Otegbeye 2023, the incumbent administrative forces struck back with unprecedented malice. You were punished and systematically denied the APC senatorial ticket to return to the Senate, all because you refused to capitulate to the transactional Lagos invasion and chose instead to camp with the African Democratic Congress (ADC) to campaign for an authentic native son. The party structure stripped you of your statutory ticket as an act of absolute political vendetta.
You both bled politically and personally. You lost positions, you lost peace, and you faced the lion’s den—all for Yewa. Yet today, a smooth-talking political tourist walks in with zero scars, expecting to inherit the kingdom on a platter of gold provided by a financially lubricated cartel.
We are deeply alarmed by the absolute lack of historical consciousness and structural integrity guiding this current project. The analytical community across the state has rightfully raised red flags regarding the fundamental question of ancestry surrounding Senator Yayi’s candidacy. For over twenty years, this individual built an immensely lucrative political and legislative career entirely within Lagos State, climbing from the Lagos State House of Assembly to the House of Representatives and ultimately serving as the Senator representing Lagos West.
It was only when the constitutional limits of his ambition in Lagos were reached that he suddenly turned his sights toward Ogun West, fabricating a convenient ancestral narrative to claim our senatorial seat as a personal stepping stone. Prominent stakeholders and former diplomats, including Ambassador Folake Marcus-Bello, have publicly challenged this identity flip, pointing out that Yayi had previously claimed Ekiti State indigeneship during his earlier professional career at The Guardian newspaper before adopting a brand-new persona for political utility. At the outset, some members of the Ilaro Cabal rose up to question his identity but capitulated under the weights of Ghana must go bags and alerts from banks.
Lawsuits filed across the Federal High Courts in Abuja and Abeokuta have continuously demanded a judicial review of his statutory declarations and Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) filings. While several compromised local politicians have been pressured or financially induced into withdrawing their legal challenges under the guise of “Ogun West unity,” the physical and historical reality remains unshakeable: Senator Yayi is an imported political actor with no verifiable local roots, family compound, or sustained historic contribution to the core development of Yewa land. Community leaders have openly confessed that his lineage is entirely unknown to the elders of the land. To allow a man who spent his life developing another state to suddenly parachute in and monopolize the highest political office allocated to Ogun West is a structural insult to the abundance of qualified, brilliant, and native Yewa sons and daughters who have stayed behind to endure and build our communities.
Nothing exposes the raw, financial greed of this Ilaro cabal more clearly than their treatment of their very own kin. The tragedy of the Yewa Agenda is that it has been turned into a commercial marketplace vulnerable to the highest bidder, where local brokers demonstrate that financial muscle and material inducement count for far more than ancestry or character.
We must soberly review the events of the 2023 governorship election to see the depths of this betrayal. When a genuine, verifiable, and highly qualified standard-bearer of the Ogun West, Biyi Otegbeye, stepped forward to contest, one would assume his home base would rally behind him. Yet, despite Otegbeye being a native son of Ilaro, this exact same money-driven cabal actively stopped and sabotaged him. They deliberately starved his campaign of local structural support and abandoned their own brother in the middle of the battlefield. The explanation is clear: despite Otegbeye representing a genuine local mandate, the faction deliberately chose to freeze the Yewa agenda. They treated the region’s political future as leverage, keeping it on hold while actively securing profitable, illicit agreements with the imported senator. After securing positions in the future cabinet and money for the bread of today, these brokers are singing his praises and have declared him a “consensus candidate” because ti enu ba ti je oju ma nti ni (When you take what you shouldn’t, you can’t look the giver in the eye). They are celebrating what they call “developmental philanthropy”—the sudden, strategic distribution of transformers, primary health center renovations, and a highly publicized batch of 119 campaign vehicles and ambulances that triggered immediate petitions to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) over the questionable sources of such staggering funds. We reject this insult to our collective intelligence. Sponsoring ad-hoc philanthropy is not governance, and buying the compliance of local actors with luxury vehicles does not erase an individual’s lack of indigenous legitimacy. If Ogun West allows its governorship struggle to be permanently subordinated to elite bargaining and financial inducements, history will remember 2027 not as our moment of liberation, but as the final transaction where our political custodians sold our birthright forever.
Your Excellencies, the political capital and names you both possess are the most powerful endorsements in the entirety of Ogun State. Because of your deep history with our region, the transactional cartel backing Yayi is desperately seeking your validation to give their fraudulent imposition a stamp of historical legitimacy. They want to use your hard-earned reputations as a shield against the growing fury of genuine Ogun West indigenes who feel disenfranchised by this Lagos invasion. We are angry.
Therefore, in the spirit of preserving the long-term democratic sanity of our state, this letter serves as a respectful but uncompromising request for absolute strategic caution, imploring Your Excellencies to adopt the following positions:
| Strategic Pillar | Mandate for the Former Governors | Core Political Objective |
| 1. Enforce Absolute Disengagement | Remain strictly and natively on the sidelines of the 2027 Olurin 2.0 race; withhold all political machinery, public endorsements, and network access from the Yayi campaign. | Starve the transactional Ilaro cabal of the historic legitimacy they need to validate an outsider’s imposition. |
| 2. Demand Internal Cleansing First | Refuse to intermediate or endorse any Ogun West candidate until the internal structural contradictions engineered by this money-driven cabal are formally resolved. | Break the toxic cycle where a small group of monetarily induced brokers systematically splits our regional voting bloc and crashes our gubernatorial campaigns. |
| 3. Protect Indigenous Identity | Reject the systematic commercialization of our heritage; declare that the Yewa governorship cannot be treated as a revolving door for wealthy political tourists. | Safeguard the political future of authentic native sons and daughters, ensuring our heritage is not bartered away for the next 16 years. |
If we fail to stand firm now, the consequences will extend far beyond the next election cycle. Allowing a wealthy stranger to hijack our regional slot means that in another 16 years, the genuine, native sons and daughters of Yewa will still be stranded in the political wilderness, demanding the same basic recognition their forebears fought for. They will look back at 2027 and wonder how a historical struggle for regional self-determination was allowed to morph into a highly lucrative commercial trade ring operated by a few local brokers.
Your Excellencies, you have already done your part. You have spent your personal money in billions, faced down a decade of malicious trials, forfeited your senatorial tickets, and proved your deep affection for the Yewa people. Do not allow your glorious legacies to be weaponized or dragged into a deeply compromised campaign that subordinates our ancestry to financial inducements. Do not give your blessing to an “Olurin 2.0/Yayi 2.0” farce that seeks to accomplish through money what it lacks in authentic indigenous blood. If you stand your ground, the people of Yewa will sit and reach a common ground. Let us imagine the multiplier effects of OGD and SIA synergy in this battle to save Ogun state from hijackers. With OGD and SIA acting as joint guarantors of a true, uncorrupted regional mandate, the Yewa project is instantly rescued from the “waiting room” of political exploitation. Your combined backing provides an authentic, credible platform for an indigenous Yewa leader to emerge cleanly—completely free from the transactional strings and backroom deals of an imported godfather system. The two of you have the wherewithal to put an end to the activities of these shenanigans that litter the Yewa axis. Do this to further cement your legacies .
Reject the false narrative that Yewa indigenes are cursed. This is a baseless, toxic claim manufactured by a self-serving political cabal. They use this myth for one reason only: to legitimize their betrayal and mortgage the proud heritage of the Yewa people to political profiteers. We must see this lie for what it is and wholly refuse it. We implore you to lock your gates, withhold your blessings, and order this transactional caravan to halt. Let Yewa land sit down in its own house, confront this internal overbearing cabal, banish the brokers who trade our dignity, and align its native house before any elder statesman steps in to assist.
Thank you for your enduring leadership, your past historic sacrifices, and your unwavering commitment to the sovereign progress of Ogun State.
Highest regards,
Former President , National Association of Egbado Students , OAU
