By Segun Olatunji
Since last Wednesday, the world’s politico-scientific community has been left with a scramble to update its textbooks after the reality-distorting spectacle that occurred at the Tetede Hall in Ilaro. In a feat that defies all laws of political gravity, the Peoples Democratic Party governorship candidate in Ogun State, Hon Ladi Adebutu, apparently stormed the very heart of Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola Yayi’s stronghold and was given what his media team has aggressively termed a “hero’s welcome.”
This was indeed a sight to behold – assuming you only looked through a heavily cropped lens and ignored the convoy of suspicious rented interstate commercial buses idling just down the road around the location of the hall.
Of course, with Adebutu’s Ilaro “rally,” the field of political psychiatry has a staggering new case study, and it comes straight out of Tetede Hall in Ilaro. Scientists have dubbed it “Lado-mania”—a rare, expensive psychological condition where a billionaire looks at a fleet of idling interstate buses, smells the unmistakable aroma of freshly minted mobilisation allowances and promptly concludes, “Yes, the people of Ogun West love me.”
For a few hours on Wednesday, the Ladi Adebutu Campaign Organisation (LADO) managed to turn a quiet afternoon in Ilaro, headquarters of Yewa South Local Government, into a masterclass in political theatre when his rent-a-crowd circus landed in Yayi’s domain. To hear Adebutu’s handlers tell it, thousands of “purebred, authentic” Ogun West indigenes spontaneously abandoned their businesses, forgot about Senator Yayi’s massive local constituency projects, and jumped into the streets to pledge eternal allegiance to a billionaire from Iperu-Remo.
The scenario was a touching display of sudden passionate affection for the PDP governorship candidate. So passionate, infact, that many in the “indigenous crowd” accidentally asked for directions to the local market in Ilaro and struggled to articulate their support in the local Yewa dialect. During Adebutu’s “miracle of Ilaro”, Lagos accents clashed with Ogun West politics. But wait a minute, who needs local roots when you have an excellent mobilisation budget?
The sheer comedy of the event lies in the absolute desperation to conjure relevance in a territory that has been thoroughly “Yayified”. But the PDP’s strategy to win over the Ogun West electorate seems to rely on a different kind of infrastructure: the importation of a crowd of professional cheerleaders.
While Senator Yayi has been busy turning the local landscape into a perpetual construction site—facilitating the structural upgrade of the Federal Polytechnic Ilaro to a full-fledged Federal University of Technology, building the ultra-modern Pahayi Market, and distributing mega-million scholarships to real, verifiable students from all over the three senatorial districts of Ogun State—the Adebutu camp arrived with a vastly different offering – stomach infrastructure.
The Adebutu deceit was almost beautiful in its clumsiness as a new electorate was teleported to Ilaro. Interstate commercial buses strangely matching vehicles seen at previous rallies in Abeokuta and Sagamu miraculously surfaced in Ilaro. This is complemented by the appearance of the “Yewa/Awori” crowd with distinct Lagos accents at the Ilaro rally. Supposed grassroots stakeholders who seemed far more familiar with the bus stops of Ikeja, Agege and Abule-Egba in Lagos than the geography of Yewaland suddenly found themselves dematerialised in a strange land courtesy Adebutu’s “amnesia strategy”, cheering a candidate currently battling with Federal Government court cases over alleged vote-buying during the previous election cycle.
On this fateful day in Ilaro, Adebutu’s “DNA politics” decided to take on Senator Yayi’s masses-oriented policy of concrete deliverables. But unable to match the concrete visible scorecard of Senator Yayi – which ranges from distribution of mega-million scholarships and bursaries for over 5,000 real, verifiable students from across the entire Ogun State to myriads of heavy road infrastructure – the Adebutu camp descended into playing the “ancestry card”. Instead of matching Yayi’s scorecard of tarmac and transformers, Adebutu’s handlers spent the day demanding DNA tests and arguing about who is a “purebred” Ogun indigene. They spent the entire duration of the rally shouting about who is “atohunrinwa” and who needs a DNA to prove his umbilical cord was buried somewhere in Yewaland; as if when local traders are enjoying modern market stalls or youths are gaining employment after undergoing training from local ICT centres facilitated by the APC governorship flagbearer, they would first ask to check Yayi’s ancestral umbilical cord registry. This is a bold strategy for a candidate whose most famous contribution to recent Ogun electoral history isn’t infrastructure, but a Federal criminal docket.
There’s no doubt that Adebutu’s recent campaign safari into Ogun West was billed as a grand hostile takeover. It was meant to prove that the PDP under its tattered umbrella could march right into the fortress of Senator Yayi and plant their equally tattered flag. Instead, it became a spectacular comedy of errors, where a highly transactional afternoon was hilariously mistaken for a grassroots revolution. Thinking it was business as usual, the PDP governorship flagbearer allegedly attempted to grease royal palms, but the Yewa traditional rulers, led by the Olu of Ilaro and Paramount Ruler of Yewaland, Oba Kehinde Olugbenle, reportedly spurned his largesse and pointedly told him their people had made their choice of voting for their own son, Senator Yayi, come the 2027 governorship election in Ogun State.
Adebutu’s Ogun West’s “show of force” was indeed a masterclass in the geography of confusion. To truly appreciate the depth of Adebutu’s delusion, one must admire the absolute logistical desperation of the event. For a few hours, Ilaro was treated to the sights and sounds of a “spontaneous” indigenous uprising. It was deeply moving to see thousands of “Yewa sons and daughters” so passionately interested in Adebutu’s destiny.
But it was only slightly awkward that a significant portion of this “local crowd” possessed thick Lagos mainland accents and spent the afternoon asking where they could find the nearest BRT lane.
The PDP governorship flagbearer, Adebutu’s recent rally in Ilaro was a masterclass in political delusion, mistaking a rented crowd of imported supporters for a genuine Yewa mandate, turning a transactional afternoon into a laughable theatrical performance. While his camp pathetically attempted to manufacture local loyalty to mask their lack of grassroots support, the actual residents of Ogun West remain firmly aligned with the tangible infrastructure progress delivered by their own beloved son of the soil, ranking Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, popularly called Yayi
In actual fact, Adebutu’s strategy was as lazy as it was transparent: if you cannot convince the actual residents of Ogun West to abandon the visible, concrete deliverables of Senator Yayi, simply import an entirely new electorate for the day. It was political alchemy at its finest—turning rented cheerleaders from Abeokuta, Sagamu and the Lagos border towns into instantly loyal Yewa stakeholders. Who needs local roots when you have an excellent transport coordinator and an endless supply of branded t-shirts?
The real tragedy of the Adebutu campaign is the unshakable belief that a mediocre theatrical performance can erase a massive structural deficit—and an even larger legal one. The PDP strategy relies heavily on the hope that the people of Ilaro suffer from collective, medical-grade amnesia.
Lest we forget, while Yayi inaugurates verifiable physical infrastructure projects, Adebutu has been frantically commissioning lawyers to defend him over his past electoral infractions. This is, after all, the same politician whose desperate attempts to squash the Federal Government’s vote-buying and criminal conspiracy trial against him were thoroughly laughed out of the Ogun State High Court. When the court ordered his trial to proceed over allegations of distributing 200,000 preloaded ATM cards on election day, his camp didn’t offer answers—rather, they offered appeals.
Apparently, Adebutu’s grand plan to win over Ogun West is to skip the troublesome part of actually executing public projects and go straight to what his camp knows best: heavily mobilised, swipe-and-stay pre-loaded ATM card transactions.
With the Ilaro “rally”, Adebutu has only succeeded in getting for himself a mandate in a perfect hollow Tetede Hall vacuum. There is a very big world of difference between an authentic “Yewa Mandate” and a “Tetede Hall Mandate.” An authentic mandate is forged in the quiet voting booths of local farmers, traders and youths, who examine their lives and vote for progress. A Tetede Hall “mandate,” however, lasts exactly as long as the petrol in the tanks of the hired interstate buses that teleported the new “Yewa electorate” to Ilaro last Wednesday.
The moment the Ilaro “rally” ended, the great illusion dissolved. The “passionate Ogun West youths” boarded their respective interstate commercial vehicles, collected their promised stipends, and headed back down the Lagos-Abeokuta expressway, leaving Ilaro exactly as they met it: firmly Yayi territory.
Ultimately, the “rousing welcome” in Ilaro for Adebutu and his rented crowd was a glorious exercise in self-delusion. It was an event where Adebutu and the PDP successfully convinced themselves, their hired commercial crowd and contractors as well as a few wandering goats that they had captured the entire Ogun West.
Yet, back at the LADO campaign headquarters, the champagne corks are likely popping. The media team is busy typing up delusional press releases about how Ogun West has been “conquered.” It is a beautiful, wildly expensive hallucination.
If elections were decided by the loudest cheers from a captive audience of paid contractors and cheerleaders, Ladi Adebutu would already be the next occupant of the Oke Mosan Governor’s Office. But back in the real world, where judges look at evidence and voters look at infrastructure, the actual people of Ilaro are still laughing at the Adebutu circus that sauntered into their town, made some fitful noises in the name of a campaign rally, took a bow and drove away in hired interstate commercial buses.
If the road to the Ogun State Government House in the forthcoming 2027 governorship election is paved and lined with heavily paid hired crowds, rented buses and theatrical ancestral tree debates, then the PDP governorship candidate is already victorious. But in reality, the actual Ilaro and Ogun West people are likely still wondering who those loud people teleported in the interstate commercial buses were and when they are returning to where they actually came from.
In a nutshell, the PDP governorship flagbearer, Adebutu’s recent rally in Ilaro was a masterclass in political delusion, mistaking a rented crowd of imported supporters for a genuine Yewa mandate, turning a transactional afternoon into a laughable theatrical performance. While his camp pathetically attempted to manufacture local loyalty to mask their lack of grassroots support, the actual residents of Ogun West remain firmly aligned with the tangible infrastructure progress delivered by their own beloved son of the soil, ranking Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola, popularly called Yayi.
•Olatunji, a Journalist, Political/Crisis Communication Strategist, writes from Ilaro
•Opinions, positions or thoughts expressed here are personal and strictly of the writer/author and do not represent the views of The Daily Crucible.
