There is a question every citizen of Ogun State is entitled to ask, and it is not a complicated one. If a government borrows heavily, collects taxes aggressively, and sits on one of the most industrialised corridors in West Africa, where exactly did the money go? After years of the Dapo Abiodun administration, that question has no satisfying answer. What Ogun has instead is a growing debt profile, a citizenry squeezed by levies, and a landscape of projects announced with fanfare and delivered late, partially or not at all.
Debt Is Only Defensible If It Buys Something
Borrowing is not inherently a sin. A government that takes a loan to build a bridge that lasts fifty years has done something rational. The test is whether the asset outlives the liability. On that test, Abiodun’s Ogun fails repeatedly. Residents are asked to accept a heavier debt burden while driving on roads that dissolve in the first serious rainy season, queuing at hospitals short of staff and supplies, and watching schools deteriorate. Debt taken on for consumption, ceremony and contracts that produce more paperwork than infrastructure is not investment. It is a bill handed to the next generation for a party they were not invited to.
Squeezing the Small Trader While Courting the Big Investor
Ogun’s revenue drive has fallen hardest on precisely the people least able to absorb it. Market traders, transporters, small workshop owners and roadside enterprises describe a thicket of levies, agents and demands that change without notice. Meanwhile the state has spent years advertising itself to large investors with incentives, waivers and photo opportunities. The result is a revenue system that behaves like a regressive tax: the least powerful pay proportionally the most, and the returns are least visible in the communities that pay them. A government genuinely interested in growth would have made it easier to run a small business in Ogun. This one made it more expensive.
The Industrial Boast That Never Reached the Household
No claim has been repeated more often by this administration than Ogun’s status as an industrial hub. It is true that factories sit along the state’s corridors. It is equally true that the ordinary residents of Sagamu, Ifo, Ado-Odo/Ota and Ijebu have not experienced this as prosperity. Industrial presence is not the same as industrial benefit. Where are the local supply chains, the technical training pipelines, the community infrastructure agreements, the transparent accounting of what the state actually earns from the companies it celebrates? Announcing investment is easy. Converting it into wages, skills and public revenue that reaches a household budget is the work of governance, and it was not done.
Contracts in the Dark
Ogun residents have grown used to learning about major projects through commissioning ceremonies rather than procurement notices. The pattern is familiar across Nigeria and no less corrosive for being common: contracts awarded without competitive daylight, costs that drift upward without explanation, timelines that slip without consequence, and completion certificates issued for work that any resident can see is unfinished. When a state cannot show its citizens what it agreed to pay, to whom, and for what, the burden of proof shifts. Silence is not neutrality. In public finance, silence is an answer.
Land, Demolition and the Cost of Being Poor in a Growing State
Ogun’s proximity to Lagos has made its land enormously valuable, and that value has not been managed in the interest of the people who live on it. Communities in the border corridors have faced regularisation demands, contested titles, sudden demolition notices and a bureaucracy that is expensive to navigate and impossible to appeal. Families who bought land in good faith have found themselves paying twice, or losing everything. A government that treated its citizens as stakeholders would have built a transparent, affordable and predictable land administration system. Abiodun’s government instead presided over one where uncertainty itself became a revenue stream.
Politics Before Performance, Every Time
The energy this administration failed to bring to Ogun’s finances was abundantly available for its political battles. Party control, succession arrangements, the disciplining of internal rivals and the management of alliances have absorbed attention that a struggling state could not spare. Governance became the by-product of politics rather than its purpose. That inversion explains much of the record: a government structured to win the next contest is not structured to finish the last project, and Ogun’s half-built inheritance is the physical evidence.
What Ogun Should Demand in 2027
The lesson of the Abiodun years is not simply that one governor underperformed. It is that Ogun voters accepted announcements as a substitute for accounts. The correction is available and it is specific. Demand a published debt register and what each loan bought. Demand open procurement. Demand a revenue system that stops treating market women as its base and industrialists as its guests. Demand land administration that a farmer can understand without a lawyer. Ogun State is not short of wealth, location or people. It has been short of a government willing to be examined, and in 2027 that is the only qualification worth insisting on.
This article represents an editorial opinion based on publicly available information.
