By Samson O. Oderinde
As the 2027 Ogun State governorship race gathers momentum, one pattern has become impossible to ignore: Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola — popularly known as Yayi is increasingly being litigated on questions of origin and other mundane issues, rather than on the record he has actually built.
That is a distraction Ogun State cannot afford. In choosing a governor, the primary consideration must not be “Where is he from?” but “What has he done, and what can he do?” By that standard, Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, Yayi, presents one of the most compelling credentials in this contest.
A Record Built, Not Borrowed
Senator Adeola’s political career did not begin with this candidacy. He rose through the Lagos State House of Assembly, the House of Representatives, and two terms as Senator for Lagos West before winning the Ogun West Senate seat in 2023 — a rare cross-district trajectory that reflects sustained electoral success across three different constituencies over more than two decades.
Since 2023, he has chaired the Senate Committee on Appropriations — arguably the single most consequential committee in the National Assembly, with direct oversight of federal budgeting, including the ₦68.3 trillion 2026 Appropriation Bill. That is not a ceremonial post. It is a seat that shapes how national resources move, and it has given Senator Adeola a granular, insider’s understanding of public finance that few governorship aspirants anywhere in Nigeria can claim.
On the ground, his supporters point to a rapid, visible footprint: scholarships, vocational training schemes, small-business support, healthcare and electrification interventions, and — by his three-year mark in the Senate — a reported 150 completed infrastructure projects spanning all three senatorial districts of Ogun State, not just his home base of Ogun West.
Whatever one makes of the framing, the volume and geographic spread of these projects form the kind of scorecard voters can actually inspect, ward by ward, rather than take on faith.
His formal emergence as APC’s consensus candidate was not a backroom formality — it followed a reported six months of negotiation involving the party’s most senior figures nationally and in the state, and was later ratified by a primary victory exceeding 300,000 votes, a scale of intra-party support that is difficult to dismiss as manufactured.
The Origin Argument Doesn’t Hold Up
Much of the resistance to Senator Adeola’s candidacy has centered on his roots — with some critics citing Lagos, others going further to claim an Ekiti origin entirely. Neither version changes the underlying logic of capacity over origin. Both deserve to be met head-on, rather than tiptoed around.
Let it be on record: Senator Adeola’s Yewa indigene status is not in doubt and cannot be faulted. Even taking the Ekiti claim at face value for argument’s sake, it would prove nothing disqualifying. Yewa communities have never been static. The 19th_century Dohomean wars and regular raiding of Yewa communities for slaves and tribute, forced many Yewa people to flee.
Abeokuta, as the Egba strong hold, became a place of refuge. So did Lagos, Badagry, other Yorubaland and parts of present-day Benin Republic and Togo.
Families have moved across Yoruba-speaking territory and beyond it, for centuries, following trade, farmland, and kinship rather than modern state boundaries drawn long after the fact.
This is not a rare or suspicious exception; it is the ordinary history of the area. Based on the foregoing, communities bearing names like Isaga can be found scattered across Ilaro, Ota, Ado-Odo, Ipaja, and even Iju in Lagos State and Ibara in Abeokuta — the same family names, the same roots, spread wherever Yewa people went to settle, farm and trade, (after they were dispersed by the wars). Migrations from Oyo into present-day Isaga, Ibese, Igbogila Iboro, Joga, Imasai, and many others, for instance, date back roughly two centuries, and the descendants of those movements are today unquestionably Yewa, indistinguishable in belonging from families with no migration story to tell at all. Ancestry two or three or ten generations back does not override generations of actual residence, marriage, farming, and community life in the place a family calls home now.
More to the point, the same Ogun West electorate supposedly best positioned to judge who belongs is the electorate that elected Senator Adeola (Yayi) to the Senate in 2023. If the people he represents accept him as their own, it is difficult to see on what basis outsiders to that community or opposing campaigns looking for any available line of attack — should override that judgment with a genealogy argument.
Reducing a candidate’s legitimacy to a birth certificate or a great-grandparent’s home town, rather than to the votes he has actually won and the work he has actually done, sets a troubling precedent for a democracy that is supposed to reward performance and representation over bloodlines.
Why Ogun West’s Turn Matters
Ogun State has never had a governor from Ogun West since its creation in 1976 — a fact that has fuelled decades of political frustration in the district despite its population and economic weight. For the first time in recent memory, Ogun West has coalesced around a single consensus figure rather than splintering its influence across competing sons and daughter of the soil.
That unity is itself a political achievement, and squandering it would set the district’s ambitions back another generation. Globally, such denial will weaken party trust state and nationwide, telling our people that unity does not matter.
It is also a legitimate fairness argument, not merely a sentimental one: having just produced the incumbent governor from Ogun East (Prince Dapo Abiodun, from Iperu), it would be difficult to justify that zone retaining the seat again while a united, numerically strong Ogun West is asked to wait once more.
It should not escape notice that Senator Adeola’s most prominent PDP rival, Hon. Ladi Adebutu, also traces his family base to Iperu — meaning that outside Senator’s candidacy, Ogun East interest remain positioned to extend the district’s hold on the Government House, regardless of party. For a district that has waited fifty years for its turn, watching one Iperu family potentially hand the baton to another will not read as coincidence. It will read as the same door closing twice.
Every election cycle, when an Ogun West candidate rises into serious contention, familiar objections resurface from other zones — questions about origin, “readiness,” or loyalty that rarely receive the same scrutiny when applied to candidates from Ogun Central or Ogun East. Ogun West voters are entitled to notice the pattern: the objections change in wording each time, but their timing and target rarely do. That does not mean every concern raised is made in bad faith — legitimate questions deserve legitimate answers — but a fair-minded observer should ask why the scrutiny intensifies specifically when Ogun West’s turn appears close.
A Ladder Built by Self
Senator Adeola’s story is unique. He did not inherit a business empire or financial backing from his parents. He merely climbed-up through hard-work — State Assembly to House of Representatives, to two full Senate terms representing Lagos West, then a contested, unproven move to Ogun West that he had to win on the ground, twice over, before the Ogun APC establishment will even consider him.
Every rung of that ladder was earned in an election, not conferred by a surname. By the time he reached the Chairmanship of the Senate
Committee on Appropriations — one of the most powerful posts in the National Assembly — he had already spent over two decades proving himself in rooms where his father’s name meant nothing, because it was never asked. He has spent his entire political career answering to voters rather than to irrelevance.
It is worth confronting directly the argument some will raise: that Senator Adeola’s consensus candidacy was itself brokered — negotiated among APC’s national and state leadership rather than won purely at the grassroot. That framing gets the sequence backwards. Party leaders do not spend six months negotiating consensus around a name with nothing to show for it; they consolidate around someone whose record already makes the case for them.
The consensus followed the achievement, not the other way round — about 150 completed projects across all three senatorial districts, a Senate seat won outright in a district he had never represented before 2023, and a chairmanship of the National Assembly’s most consequential budget committee are not things party elders can manufacture on a whim. They backed him because the ground had already shifted in his favour.
Nor is the endorsement merely about rewarding one man. It is the first time in Ogun state’s history that its political establishment has coalesced behind a plan to let Ogun West produce a governor at all — a fifty-year-old omission that no accident of consensus-building explains away. Senator Adeola (Yayi) is not the cause of that historic opening; he is the person whose record made party leaders comfortable finally acting on it.
A consensus that corrects a five-decade imbalance in representation is not patronage. It is overdue recognition, arrived at through the ordinary, legitimate mechanics of party politics that candidates from various parties have also relied on to get to where they are.
An Opportunity Ogun Cannot Keep Missing
Ogun State sits on the doorstep of Lagos — Nigeria’s commercial and industrial capital — yet has never fully converted that proximity into the scale of investment, manufacturing spillover, and infrastructure integration the geography should make almost automatic.
That takes relationships, not just goodwill: working federal ties, credibility with Lagos’s political and business establishment, and a track record inside the National Assembly structures that actually control budget lines and project approvals.
This is precisely where Senator Adeola Yayi’s background stops being incidental and becomes strategic. Two full terms representing Lagos West gave him direct, long-standing relationships across Lagos’s political class. The Appropriations Committee chairmanship gives him a seat at the table where federal capital projects are decided.
A governor who already has both relationships walking into office, rather than needing years to build them, is a governor who can move faster on the roads, rail links, port access, and industrial corridors that would let Ogun finally capture more of the value flowing past its borders.
A Word to Ogun West
To the people of Ogun West: do not let noise wear you down. The objections will keep coming, dressed up in new language each time, but the substance has not changed — an attempt to keep a numerically strong, historically overlooked district waiting yet again. Ogun West has done the hard part already: it put its house in order and rallied behind one name instead of scattering its votes across rival sons of the soil. This unity did not happen overnight. It is 50 years in the making – and it is rarer, and more fragile, than it looks.
Guard it!
A house divided against itself cannot stand. Whatever disagreements exist within the ranks, they are smaller than the goal in front of everyone: a first governor from Ogun West, chosen not on sentiment but on a record no rival in this race can currently match. The distance left to cover is shorter than it has ever been. It will be a historic misstep to lose it now to fatigue, distraction, or division manufactured by those who benefit most from Ogun West staying divided.
The Standard Ogun State Should Apply
Every aspirant should be judged against the same simple questions:
• Have you built a tangible path?
• What measurable projects have you personally delivered, and where?
• What institutions or systems have you built or improved through your own labour?
• What experience equips you for the demands of running a treasury, not just a foundation or a family enterprise?
Political pedigree and wealth open doors. They do not, by themselves, earn public trust. Ogun State’s coming contest should be decided on records, ward-level project lists, and twenty years of demonstrated capacity — not on the names that were built by someone else. Ogun West has waited 50 years for one of its own to lead the state. History rarely offers a second chance. This one must not be squandered.
In 2027, a well-earned name and a track record of service should be all that matters.
Samson O. Oderinde; is a Public Analyst, Politician, Author and Provost writes from Igbogila-Yewa.
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