Once upon a time, in the ancient kingdom called Ile-Ade, a king inherited a palace that looked as if nobody had lived there for years.
Yes, the throne was still standing. The palace gates were still painted. The king’s portrait was still hanging proudly on the wall. But inside, everything was different.
The treasury was gasping.
The farms were abandoned.
The roads leading to the palace had become death traps.
The palace workers complained that their wages could not feed their families. The young people had stopped asking the palace for jobs because they had concluded that the palace had no jobs to give.
Even the royal kitchen had become a place of quarrels. Everybody was hungry, yet food disappeared from the storeroom. The princes and princesses got the best meat. Their cheeks were round and soft. Members of the royal family grew rotund while the people grew lean.
No, it was not that the king was outwardly mean or expressly wicked. Indeed, he was a charming man. He made beautiful speeches. He often promised the moon and assured his people that the moon was already on its way. He was that nice.
Unfortunately, the kingdom discovered that speeches do not repair roads. Being charming cannot solve the problems of a hungry family. A grumbling rumbling stomach needs food, not music and dance.
After many seasons of waste and lack, a new king ascended the throne but he did not immediately sit on the throne.
He walked around the palace.
He entered the treasury.
He visited the farms.
He looked at the roads.
He spoke to the palace workers.
He visited the schools.
He went to the clinics.
He asked the young men and women what they wanted.
Then he returned to the throne room, looked at his advisers and said:
We cannot continue like this. Before we build a new palace, we must first clean the old one.
That was how the real work began.
He did not call it magic.
He called it PROSPERITY.
That little story, in many ways, captures the political proposition being placed before the people of Osun State by the All Progressives Congress governorship candidate, Munirudeen Bola Oyebamiji, popularly known as AMBO.
The central question is not whether a politician can make promises. Every politician can promise. Nigerian political history is littered with promises that died immediately after election day.
The bigger question is: What does the new man say he will do differently?
AMBO’s answer is contained in his seven-point PROSPER Agenda.
And there is something deliberately simple about the name.
PROSPER is not a complicated government acronym that requires a professor to explain it to a market woman. It is a word everybody understands.
People want to prosper.
The farmer wants to prosper.
The teacher wants to prosper.
The civil servant wants to prosper.
The trader wants to prosper.
The artisan wants to prosper.
The graduate looking for his first job wants to prosper.
The pensioner wants to prosper.
The child in the village school deserves the opportunity to prosper.
That is where the political conversation becomes interesting.
It’s an agenda that puts the people first.
The first P stands for Poverty Alleviation, Workers’ Welfare and Job Creation.
This is perhaps the most immediate part of the agenda because poverty does not wait for government paperwork.
When a family cannot afford food, the family does not need a beautiful policy document. It needs relief, immediate relief.
When a worker has worked for months and is waiting for salary, the worker does not need political grammar. He needs his pay, sufficient, decent pay.
When a young graduate has searched for employment for years, he does not need another motivational speech. He needs an opportunity.
AMBO’s proposal includes targeted social intervention, prompt payment of salaries, enterprise support, investment, public works and empowerment programmes for young people and women.
The philosophy is straightforward: government must not merely administer poverty; it must fight it. When you remove hunger from poverty, you whittle down poverty’s power.
A responsible government is one that remembers who owns it. The second R stands for Responsive, Accountable and Transparent Governance.
This is where the palace story becomes relevant.
A palace does not belong to the king. It is the palace that owns the king.
The king merely occupies it temporarily. ‘Ahere ni r’eyin oloko’. The hut always outlives the farmer.
Government is exactly like that.
The governor does not own the state. He is just a temporary occupant, tenant of an office created by the people.
So when AMBO talks about open, people-centred governance, transparent budgeting, prudent management of resources and accountability, he is talking about something fundamental, something most Number One state citizens often forget.
Every governor must remember that the people who voted him, and those who didn’t, are the real landlords of the lodge.
That means public money should be treated as public money. Projects should be explainable. Budgets should be understandable. Decisions should have consequences.
And leadership should not become a private club where only friends, relatives and political loyalists understand what is going on.
Next is the opening of the economic doors where the O stands for Opportunities for Economic Growth.
Osun cannot build prosperity by depending entirely on government salaries.
The state needs entrepreneurs.
It needs factories.
It needs investors.
It needs small businesses that can become medium businesses and medium businesses that can become large businesses.
Oyebamiji’s agenda proposes expanding opportunities for SMEs, strengthening the Osun State Investment Promotion Agency, attracting local and foreign investments and reviving strategic economic assets and industrial hubs.
This is important because every successful investor creates more than one job.
A factory employs workers.
The workers buy food.
The food seller pays another person.
The transporter moves the goods, raw materials and finished products.
The mechanic repairs the vehicles.
The landlord collects rent.
The economy begins to breathe.
That is how prosperity spreads because everybody on the value chain makes a living. The spiral effect creates the prosperity ripple.
Osun needs to sleep with two eyes closed, without fear. The S stands for Security, Safety and Social Protection.
A hungry man needs food.
But a businessman also needs security.
An investor needs confidence.
A farmer needs to know that he can go to his farm and return home in one piece.
Our children must be able to go to school and return safely.
A community needs to know that when trouble comes, help will not arrive after everybody has been abducted or buried.
This prosperity agenda proposal includes stronger collaboration with security agencies, community-based security initiatives, expanded social protection and improved crisis response.
The principle is simple:
There can be no prosperity where people are afraid to live, work and invest.
Dignity must return to the farm. Osun must stop ignoring her natural endowments. She must stop starving in the midst of abundance.
The second P is Productive Agriculture and Rural Development.
Osun cannot afford to continue with the narrative that agriculture is something poor people do while waiting for government assistance.
Agriculture is serious business.
Osun has land. It has farmers. It has young people who can be trained. It has markets.
What is often missing is the bridge between farming and serious commercial production.
That is why the proposal for agro-industrial clusters and modern farm settlements matters. Osun’s next king must do agriculture differently. He must add technology, training, financing, processing, storage and good rural roads.
Farmers in Osun must no longer simply be producing food to survive.
They must start producing for an industry.
That is the transition from subsistence to prosperity.
My people must get involved and carry their future. The focus must change from top to bottom, from the old to the young, the governed to the government.
The E stands for Education, Skills Development and Healthcare.
No state can prosper with sick people and poorly trained young people who think frail of any kind is an option.
A government may build roads and factories, but somebody must have the skills to operate the machines, manage the businesses, teach the children and provide healthcare.
AMBO’s agenda therefore proposes modernising education infrastructure, strengthening technical and vocational education, recruiting and supporting teachers and improving healthcare delivery.
This is particularly important because university certificates alone cannot solve every employment problem.
Osun needs welders.
It needs electricians.
It needs technicians.
It needs digital workers.
It needs farmers who understand modern technology.
It needs artisans who can compete outside Osun and even beyond the borders of Nigeria.
It needs young people who can create businesses rather than merely queue for government jobs or training to be the next short-lived yahoo millionaire.
R is for rebuilding what connects everybody
Then comes the final R: Renewed Infrastructure, Culture and Tourism.
Bad roads are not merely inconvenient.
They are an economic tax.
They make transportation expensive, increase the cost of food and discourage investment.
Water matters.
Power matters.
Roads matter.
Tourism matters.
Culture matters.
And Osun has an extraordinary cultural inheritance that can become an economic asset if properly packaged.
The state does not have to choose between development and culture.
It can do both.
The ancient festivals, sacred sites, traditional institutions, artistic heritage and historical locations can become part of a serious tourism economy.
But tourists need roads.
They need security.
They need accommodation.
They need clean surroundings.
They need electricity and water.
So the final R ties many of the other letters together.
However, here is the real test
Every political manifesto sounds good on paper.
The real test begins after the election.
PROSPER will have to move from an acronym to action, from document to budget and budget to project.
This AMBO PROSPER Agenda must be a measurable project.
Post August 15, 2026, the people of Osun will ask very practical questions and Oyebamiji must be ready with answers.
How many jobs?
How many kilometres of roads will this agenda produce?
How many farmers and how much investment are we looking at?
How many vocational schools will be?
Will our health facilities get the much awaited boost?
And, most importantly, how will the people know that the promises are being fulfilled?
That is the difference between a campaign slogan and a governing agenda.
Like the king in our opening story, Oyebamiji will not inherit a perfect palace.
He will inherit a messy one.
And instead of pretending that the mess did not exist, Osun’s next leader must be ready to sweep.
That may be the most useful metaphor for Osun’s political conversation today.
The state does not need another king who merely decorates the throne.
It needs leadership that looks at the palace honestly and says: this place needs cleaning.
The treasury needs discipline.
The worker needs dignity.
The young person needs opportunity and the farmer needs support.
The entrepreneur needs an enabling environment.
The child needs a good school.
The sick person needs a functioning hospital.
The community needs security.
The road needs repair.
Osun State needs an economy that produces wealth rather than merely distributing scarcity.
That, essentially, is the promise behind AMBO’s PROSPER Agenda.
Whether it will become the broom that cleans the palace, however, will ultimately depend on implementation.
Because in politics, as in kingship, the people do not eat promises.
They eat results.
And perhaps that is the real meaning of PROSPER: not simply asking Osun to dream of abundance, but presenting a roadmap for moving the state from survival to productivity, from productivity to growth, and from growth to prosperity.
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