By YINKA ANIMASHAUN
There is an old Yoruba adage that has guided the conduct of elders across generations: “Eni tó mọ́ ayé rẹ̀, kì í fi àgbára rẹ̀ kọja ààlà t’ẹlòmíràn.” Loosely translated, this means that “He who knows his worth (or place) in the world does not use his power to exceed the boundaries of another.”
It is a proverb about propriety. About the wisdom of knowing where one’s authority ends. I invoke it today for one man, Senator Opeyemi Bamidele, Senate Majority Leader, son of Ekiti, and increasingly, uninvited stakeholder in the internal politics of Ogun State.
A video has been circulating on social media capturing the Senate Majority Leader on a phone call, canvassing support for Senator Solomon Adeola Olamilekan, declaring him the next Governor of Ogun State
The next Governor of Ogun State. I want every reader to hold those words. Bamidele is from Ekiti. He does not represent Ogun state. He was not elected by Ogun state people. He carries no mandate from Ogun state. And he has taken it upon himself to decide who shall govern it.
This is, I must stress, not his first offence. Weeks earlier, he made an ill-advised pilgrimage to Ogun West, where he delivered what he dressed up as an intellectual paper, a document whose true purpose was the promotion of Yayi’s gubernatorial ambitions. He went further, forwarding excerpts to the Deputy Governor of Ogun State, Engr. Noimot Salako-Oyedele, a woman of standing and institutional loyalty to Governor Prince Dapo Abiodun, presumably expecting her gratitude.
He received something else entirely. The Deputy Governor told him, without equivocation that he was meddling in a state that was none of his business. That Prince Dapo Abiodun is undoubtedly the number one leader of the APC in Ogun state. Her response has since passed into the political vocabulary of the Southwest: “Thanks, but no thanks.”
That rebuke caused a furore of course. A lesser man might have taken the hint. Senator Bamidele doubled down. The video is his written confession.
I am not interested in reducing this to personal grievance. What Senator Bamidele is doing is structurally dangerous. In a federation as layered and combustible as ours, the internal democratic processes of state-level politics are sacred territory. They are where communities negotiate identity, where local voices decide their own futures. When a federal lawmaker, particularly one wielding the gravitas of the Senate’s second-highest office, inserts himself into those processes, he corrupts the ecosystem. He transforms a conversation that should belong to the people of Ogun state into a transaction brokered in Abuja, weighted with federal patronage and the silent threat of federal leverage.
History instructs us here. The electoral controversies of 1983 were, in no small measure, the harvest of exactly this kind of external imposition, powerful men reaching across borders, anointing candidates, overriding the democratic instincts of communities. Nigeria has paid, and continues to pay the price of that refusal to learn. Senator Bamidele is not deploying thugs. I grant him that. The principle, I am afraid, remains identical: influence exercised beyond the boundaries of one’s democratic mandate is an assault on democratic sovereignty, however it is dressed.
Let me be precise on one point. This is not an attack on Yayi as a person. Every Nigerian citizen has the constitutional right to aspire to any office. If Senator Olamilekan wishes to be Governor of Ogun State, that conversation belongs to the people of Ogun state and they are fully equipped to have it. What I insist upon is this, the questions that surround any aspiring governor are the sovereign property of the electorate, not the Senate Majority Leader from another state. The people of Ogun West will ask whether this man’s roots in their soil run deep enough. They will probe his temperament, his humility, the texture of his connection to the state he wishes to govern. They will want to know whether he has earned that right, through service, through sacrifice, through presence or whether he arrives wearing the endorsement of Abuja like a borrowed garment.
The endorsement of a Senate Majority Leader from Ekiti confers no legitimacy on any Ogun state governorship aspirant. If anything, it raises a question that demands an answer, what exactly is the transaction underpinning this extraordinary level of enthusiasm?
The people of Ogun State have watched Senator Bamidele invest political capital at a scale disproportionate even to close friendship, in a candidate whose ancestral connection to Ogun State remains, to put it charitably, a matter of legitimate public inquiry.
Ogun State people are drawing conclusions. And Nigerians, contrary to the comfortable assumption of the powerful keep political ledgers with extraordinary precision. The Ekitinization of Ogun State’s politics will not stand. I daresay.
But of course, this matter demands the President’s attention. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu whose own political biography is sewn into the fabric of Southwest politics, who understands as well as any living Nigerian the volatility of intra-party dynamics in these states carries both the authority and the obligation to act.
A Senate Majority Leader is among the most senior political officers in our federal architecture. His public interventions do not land as those of a private citizen. They arrive carrying the weight of federal authority, whether or not he intends them to. When that officer is caught on video campaigning for a gubernatorial candidate in a state he was never elected to represent, he is lending federal gravitational pull to a local political contest. Unchecked, this is the kind of precedent that quietly dismantles the principle of state sovereignty within our federation.
I call on Mr. President to call Senator Bamidele to order, firmly, and without ambiguity. The APC’s leadership in Ogun State, under Governor Dapo Abiodun, possesses both the standing and the mandate to manage its own succession. That process deserves to proceed on its own democratic terms, free from the suffocating weight of external enthusiasm dressed as fraternity.
Senator Bamidele is a man of evident intelligence. He did not ascend to his position by accident. He understands power. And it is precisely because he understands power that I address him directly: political goodwill, once lost to overreach, is extraordinarily difficult to recover. The people of Ogun State are watching. The APC leadership in Ogun is watching. The Southwest is watching.
Ogun is not Ekiti. It has never been Ekiti. And with the vigilance of its people and the integrity of its democratic instincts, it will not be remade in any other state’s image.
Senator Bamidele should leave Ogun State alone. Let this state breathe its own political air. Let its people decide their own future. Let its democracy function on its own terms. And let him return with urgency and with contrition to the magnificent, unfinished business of serving the people who actually sent him to Abuja.
Because the people of Ogun State will speak, in their own time and on their own terms. When they do, that voice will carry the full weight of democratic authority, the one authority that no Senate Majority Leader, from Ekiti or anywhere else, has ever had the power to override.
*Animashaun is a concerned citizen of Ogun State and writes via [email protected]
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