…nobody should demand that the public accept without scrutiny that Olege became a refugee specifically at Pahayi/Ilaro merely because that route conveniently establishes a modern Yewa political identity
By Wale Adedayo
Dare Odufowokan’s intervention on the controversy surrounding Senator Solomon Olamilekan Adeola’s ancestry is forceful and entertaining, but unfortunately it appears to rebut an argument substantially different from the one actually being made by a critic.
Nobody seriously needs to argue that descendants of nineteenth-century migrants must remain perpetual strangers wherever their ancestors settled. That proposition would be historically absurd. Yorubaland itself was shaped by wars, migrations, dispersals, resettlements, alliances and the establishment of new communities.
A family that settled in Ilaro generations ago can unquestionably develop a genuine Ilaro identity.
But that is not the central question.
The more difficult question is this:
Has Senator Adeola’s account of his paternal origin remained historically consistent, or has the geographical description of that origin evolved alongside his changing political geography—from Lagos politics, through the reported Joga-Orile claim, and eventually to Pahayi/Ilaro in Ogun West?
That is a question of chronology and evidence, not ancestral purity.
Isaga-Orile is no longer seriously in dispute
Ironically, the people Odufowokan describes as “emergency historians” do not have to establish Isaga-Orile as the deeper ancestral origin.
Senator Adeola’s own camp has substantially done that.
Kayode Odunaro has publicly described both himself and Adeola as “originally and historically from Isaga-Orile,” explaining that Isaga families were subsequently dispersed following the Dahomey wars.
Similarly, Chief Lawrence Osayemi, Balogun of Isaga, was reported in 2017 as saying that Adeola’s great-grandfather, Olege, migrated from Isaga-Orile to Ago-Isaga/Pahayi following the Dahomey invasion.
So the basic historical proposition being offered by Adeola’s defenders is:
Isaga-Orile → Dahomey invasion/dispersal → Olege → Ago-Isaga/Pahayi → Ilaro.
Fine.
But once such a precise migration route is advanced as the historical foundation of a modern political identity, it becomes perfectly legitimate to ask for the evidence establishing that particular route.
And this is where the debate becomes considerably more interesting.
What if the Olege migration story itself requires further examination?
There is a tendency in the current argument to treat the proposition that Olege fled specifically from Isaga-Orile to Pahayi/Ilaro as though it were already an independently established nineteenth-century historical fact.
But is it?
That should be demonstrated rather than assumed.
We know from the accounts being advanced by both sides that Isaga people did not disperse exclusively towards Ilaro. The upheavals produced Isaga settlements in several directions, including Lagos and other parts of present-day Ogun State and the Republic of Benin.
History should neither be weaponised against Senator Adeola nor rewritten for him. It should simply be followed wherever the evidence leads
Indeed, the wider family narrative attributed to Adeola’s ancestry reportedly acknowledges that sections of the Isaga family network had migrated towards the Lagos area even before the Dahomey destruction of Isaga-Orile.
That introduces an alternative historical possibility which deserves examination.
Could Olege, or the particular branch from which Adeola descended, have belonged to an Isaga family already connected to the Lagos migration before the 1862 invasion?
There is another possibility.
Could Olege have left Isaga-Orile during the Dahomey dispersal but moved towards one of the Isaga settlements associated with Lagos rather than directly to Pahayi/Ilaro?
Neither proposition should presently be asserted as fact.
But neither should the Pahayi proposition be insulated from the same evidentiary scrutiny.
If we are conducting history rather than political advocacy, all plausible migration routes should be tested against records.
And suddenly Adeola’s Lagos history becomes relevant in a different way
Senator Adeola was born in Lagos.
He was raised in Lagos.
His education was substantially in Lagos.
His professional life developed there.
His political career was established there.
He represented Alimosho in the Lagos State House of Assembly.
He subsequently represented Alimosho Federal Constituency in the House of Representatives.
He then represented Lagos West in the Senate.
For roughly two decades of elective politics, therefore, there was apparently no political contradiction between Adeola’s family identity and his being a Lagos politician.
That does not prove that his paternal ancestors originated in Lagos.
But it raises a legitimate historical question that Odufowokan’s rejoinder does not confront:
What exactly was Senator Adeola’s documented state, town and family origin throughout those Lagos political years?
That question becomes especially significant if some branches of the same wider Isaga population had been established in Lagos for generations.
If Olege’s lineage can be independently traced to Pahayi before modern politics, the matter becomes relatively straightforward.
But if that documentation cannot be produced, another possibility deserves investigation: that Adeola’s direct Isaga lineage may have had a much longer Lagos connection than the present Pahayi-centred narrative suggests.
The crucial evidence must therefore predate the political need for Ogun West
This is why contemporary attestations alone cannot finally settle the issue.
What is required are records that predate Adeola’s Ogun political project.
Where was Olege recorded?
Where did his children live?
Where were they buried?
Where was the family compound?
What do nineteenth- and early twentieth-century records say?
What did Adeola himself state on official documents before entering Ogun politics?
What appeared on his 2003 Lagos State House of Assembly records?
What appeared in 2007?
What appeared when he sought the Alimosho House of Representatives seat?
What did his early Lagos AC/ACN biographies identify as his state and town of origin?
What did his employment records at The Guardian say?
And what did his earliest publicly available biographies say before an Ogun governorship became politically relevant?
Those documents would carry considerably greater evidentiary weight than statements generated after the ancestry became politically contested.
Then comes the inconvenient Joga-Orile chapter
This is where the matter becomes particularly uncomfortable for Odufowokan’s thesis.
The allegation that Adeola previously claimed Joga-Orile did not suddenly emerge from opponents preparing for 2027.
Alhaji Raheem Ajayi, popularly known as Baglo, was publicly making the allegation in 2017.
Baglo asked pointedly when Adeola remembered Pahayi, alleging that in 2014 he had claimed Joga-Orile.
In another intervention, he described what he regarded as an evolving sequence of origins: Isaga in Abeokuta North, then Joga-Orile in Yewa North, and subsequently Pahayi in Yewa South.
That allegation is historically important because of the geography involved.
Isaga-Orile is today within Abeokuta North and Ogun Central.
Joga-Orile is in Yewa North and Ogun West.
Pahayi/Ilaro is in Yewa South and Ogun West.
Geography by itself proves no manipulation.
But chronology can.
If documentary records demonstrate that these claims emerged successively as Adeola’s political interests moved from Lagos towards Ogun and specifically Ogun West, then the criticism cannot simply be dismissed as “emergency history.”
It becomes a legitimate question about the evolution of political identity.
Joga-Orile later reappears — but as the grandmother’s origin
Curiously, subsequent family narratives have not entirely discarded Joga-Orile.
Instead, Joga-Orile reportedly reappears much later as the origin of Adeola’s paternal grandmother, Alaba, said to have come from Agbole Alapapo in Joga-Orile and to have given birth to his father, Ayinde Adeola Ogunleye.
That could provide a perfectly innocent explanation.
Perhaps Adeola’s earlier association with Joga-Orile was merely a reference to his, his later explained grandmother’s family, which could be an afterthought and was subsequently misunderstood as his paternal ancestral origin.
If so, contemporaneous documentation should settle it.
But another possibility cannot simply be ruled out without examining the evidence: was Joga-Orile at one stage being explored or presented as the politically relevant Ogun West connection before Pahayi/Ilaro became the definitive paternal-origin narrative?
That is precisely why chronology matters.
From Lagos to Isaga-Orile, Joga-Orile and Pahayi: coincidence or evolving genealogy?
Put the known and alleged stages beside one another:
Lagos — birthplace, upbringing and the platform upon which Adeola constructed almost his entire early political career.
Isaga-Orile — now acknowledged as the deeper ancestral origin of the Isaga lineage.
Joga-Orile — publicly alleged as an earlier Ogun origin claim and, but denied initially and later explained suspiciously as afterthought within the genealogy through the paternal grandmother.
Pahayi/Ilaro — subsequently presented as the destination of Olege and therefore the foundation of Adeola’s Yewa/Ilaro paternal identity.
Each element may ultimately prove historically compatible with the others.
But compatibility must be demonstrated.
It cannot merely be declared.
And there is a legitimate alternative hypothesis that deserves investigation:
Was the direct Olege lineage historically part of the Isaga migration towards Lagos, whether before or following the Dahomey invasion, with the Pahayi connection subsequently elevated—or perhaps reconstructed—as political circumstances made an Ogun West/Yewa ancestral connection increasingly important?
Again, that is a hypothesis, not a conclusion.
But it is no less legitimate a subject for historical investigation than the proposition that Olege fled directly from Isaga-Orile to Pahayi.
The evidence should decide between them.
This is where Baglo becomes particularly interesting
Alhaji Raheem Ajayi’s role in this controversy deserves closer attention precisely because he was challenging Adeola’s ancestry long before the current 2027 contest.
Baglo is associated with the Imasayi area and publicly interrogated the Joga-Orile and Pahayi narratives as far back as 2017.
The Igbogila-Imasayi axis is particularly interesting because the area contains communities whose names preserve an unmistakable Isaga presence, including Isaga Abiodun, Isaga Oke, Isaga Orita and Egba Isaga Orita.
That raises a legitimate historical research question.
Were these settlements among the communities created or enlarged by displaced Isaga people following the Dahomey upheavals?
If so, they could provide valuable evidence about the geographical dispersal of Isaga people into what subsequently became Yewa North.
But here we must distinguish between two very different propositions.
Showing that Isaga people settled in the Igbogila-Imasayi area is one thing.
Showing that Olege, the particular ancestor through whom Senator Adeola claims descent, settled there or passed through there is another.
The first is community history.
The second requires a specific genealogy.
One cannot prove the second merely by establishing the first.
And what exactly was the alleged attempt to court Baglo about?
This is where political insinuation must give way to evidence.
There have been suggestions of subsequent attempts to cultivate or reconcile with Baglo after his earlier criticism.
If such approaches occurred, political reconciliation alone would hardly be remarkable. Politicians routinely reconcile with former opponents.
But because of who Baglo is, what he wrote in 2017 and the historical geography surrounding Imasayi and Igbogila, any documented approach naturally raises additional questions.
Was Baglo being approached simply as an influential political figure?
Was his knowledge of the history of the Isaga settlements around Igbogila-Imasayi being sought?
Was there an attempt to establish whether Olege or related members of Adeola’s claimed family could be connected to those Isaga communities?
Or was there some entirely different purpose?
Until documentary evidence or direct testimony establishes the answer, it would be unfair to convert those questions into accusations.
But it would be equally premature to ridicule the questions merely because they are politically inconvenient.
There is another fundamental problem: Lagos cannot disappear from the genealogy simply because Ogun West became politically important
This is perhaps the part of the story requiring the greatest scrutiny.
If some Isaga families migrated towards Lagos before the Dahomey invasion, while others arrived following the dispersal, then Lagos is not merely where Adeola happened to be born in 1969.
Lagos potentially becomes part of the wider historical geography of the Isaga diaspora itself.
That distinction is enormous.
It means historians should investigate whether Adeola’s Lagos connection was merely accidental — his parents happened to be living there when he was born — or whether his own branch of the family had a deeper generational presence within the Isaga communities of Lagos.
If the latter were established, an obvious question follows:
At what generation did Adeola’s direct paternal family leave Pahayi for Lagos?
If Olege settled at Pahayi after 1862, who moved from Pahayi to Lagos?
When?
Where did that generation settle?
Where were subsequent generations born?
And what independent records establish the chain?
A genealogy cannot simply jump from: Olege in Pahayi to Adeola born in Lagos without documenting the intervening generations and movements.
That missing middle is potentially more important than all the rhetoric surrounding “emergency historians.”
There is a straightforward way to resolve the controversy
Produce the historical chain.
Not political endorsements.
Not statements made by contemporary supporters.
Not insults.
Not analogies about every Yoruba person returning to Ile-Ife.
The chain.
Olege → his child → grandchild → subsequent generations → Ayinde Adeola Ogunleye → Solomon Olamilekan Adeola.
For each generation:
Where was the person born?
Where did the person live?
Where was the person buried?
What family compound did the person belong to?
When did the family move from Pahayi to Lagos?
What contemporaneous records corroborate the movement?
And most importantly:
Can that genealogy be demonstrated from evidence created before Senator Adeola developed an Ogun political ambition?
If the answer is yes, the Pahayi account becomes considerably stronger.
If the answer is no, then alternative explanations—including a longer-standing Lagos-Isaga lineage—remain legitimate subjects of investigation.
The constitutional argument is a distraction
Odufowokan is correct that the Nigerian Constitution does not require a governorship candidate to demonstrate that his great-grandfather originated within the local government where the candidate claims affinity.
But nobody needs that proposition to investigate this history.
Constitutional eligibility is one question.
Historical accuracy is another.
Political claims to zoning, indigeneity and regional entitlement introduce yet another.
Senator Adeola could be constitutionally entitled to contest for governor while historians and voters continue legitimately asking whether the genealogy advanced in support of his Yewa political identity is historically accurate.
There is no contradiction between those propositions.
The question is therefore not whether migrants can become indigenes
They obviously can.
The real questions are considerably more precise:
Was Olege actually documented as migrating directly from Isaga-Orile to Ago-Isaga/Pahayi following the Dahomey invasion?
Could Olege’s branch instead have been among Isaga families already connected with Lagos before the invasion?
Could his branch have been dispersed towards Lagos during the invasion rather than Ilaro?
When did Adeola’s direct paternal descendants supposedly move from Pahayi to Lagos?
What records establish those generations?
What exactly did Adeola claim as his origin during his long Lagos political career?
Did he claim Joga-Orile around 2014, as Baglo alleged in 2017?
If he did, why?
If he did not, what contemporaneous record disproves the allegation?
Why does Joga-Orile subsequently appear in the genealogy through his paternal grandmother?
And when did Pahayi/Ilaro become the definitive description of his paternal political origin?
Those are historical questions.
They are answerable.
Perhaps the real conundrum is not where Yayi comes from, but when each version of where he comes from emerged
The most revealing investigation may therefore be chronological rather than geographical.
Start before 2003.
Examine Adeola’s records when he was still building his career in Lagos.
Follow them through his Lagos State House of Assembly years.
Then through Alimosho Federal Constituency.
Then Lagos West Senate.
Then his early attempts to enter Ogun politics.
Then the reported Joga-Orile episode.
Then the 2017 controversy.
Then the consolidation of the Olege–Isaga-Orile–Pahayi narrative.
And finally his emergence as Senator representing Ogun West.
Place those records on one timeline.
If the same genealogy appears consistently throughout, the historical record will speak for itself.
But if the asserted geography changes as the political geography changes, that too will speak for itself.
Until such evidence is assembled, nobody should assert that Olege was a Lagos migrant merely because it provides a convenient counter-narrative.
But equally, nobody should demand that the public accept without scrutiny that Olege became a refugee specifically at Pahayi/Ilaro merely because that route conveniently establishes a modern Yewa political identity.
Both propositions require evidence.
That is the point Odufowokan’s “emergency historian” argument fails to answer.
History should neither be weaponised against Senator Adeola nor rewritten for him.
It should simply be followed wherever the evidence leads.
•Opinions, positions or thoughts expressed here are personal and strictly of the writer/author and do not represent the views of The Daily Crucible.
