By Dr Ope Banwo
(The Mayor Of Fadeyi)
If Absalom was the prototype, Governor Dapo Abiodun was the modern upgrade.
Years before he ever smelled the Oke Imosan Mansion, Dapo Abiodun was just another ambitious wanabe-governor whose campaign for the Governorship of his state was floundering.
Governor Dapo Abiodun
Following several failed attempts to become a Senator and governor at different times, he finally decided to try for the governorship one more time. As the politics raged on, with strong challenges from very well founded and popular campaigns on his right and left, Dapo Abiodun’s war chest was thin, his structures were weak, and the power brokers had quietly written him off. He desperately needed a last-minute jolt to his campaign to tilt him towards victory against other well-funded campaigns from two other main contenders.
Senator Gbenga Daniel
Enter Chief Gbenga Daniel – a former Governor himself and now a respected senator from Ogun state. A man who had defied the odds in Ogun State to be the first to successfully run for ywo terms in office, a highly connected and highly skilled backroom/grassroots operator in the politics of Ogun state.
OGD, in a surprising move to many, did what many elder statesmen only talk about: he staked his name, his networks and his goodwill to help Dapo Abiodun finally fulfil his dream with last minute manouvres on Dapo’s behalf.
He opened doors in the grassroots political circles, leaned on old alliances, redirected loyal structures, and poured decades of political capital into Dapo Abiodun’s shaky campaign. OGD raised Dapo’s hands in ward after ward, while Dapo smiled gratefully beside him, signalling to all his grassroots supporters that Dapo Abiodun is his anointed man for the job. When the dust finally settled, Dapo Abiodun was crowned Governor of the state, and everyone knew whose invisible hand had steadied the sceptre.
But like Absalom, Dapo Abiodun’s gratitude did not last long. No sooner had Governor Dapo Abiodun settled into office than his eyes shifted to the next prize – the senatorial seat currently occupied by his benefactor, even before he has finished his term as governor.
The man who had lifted him up suddenly became the obstacle that had to be removed. From that point, the Absalom Syndrome began to manifest in full.
The first blow was aimed directly at the finances of OGD’s family. Dapo Abioudun started by attacking the senator:s wife’s multi-billion naira business in hopes of paralyzing both of them financially.
In a matter of days, and while court challenges were still ongoing, Dapo Abiodun’s government moved against a multi–billion-shekel commercial complex belonging to OGD’s wife – a project designed to employ hundreds of citizens in Ogun state and inject more life into the state’s economy. Despite the fact that a legal dispute over its building permit was still pending in court, Dapo Abiodun’s men rolled in the bulldozers at midnight, on a weekend when government is not even supposed to be working, and demolished the structure without waiting for judgment.
OGD, the former governor, who had more than enough loyalists to return fire and plunge the city into chaos, refused to answer violence with violence. He did not mobilise thugs. He did not sponsor riots. Like David before him, he simply went back to the courts, petitioned for redress, and asked for damages. The case is still in court two years later as I write this.
But Dapo Abiodun was not done.
Emboldened by the first demolition, he audaciously moved to wipe out almost every major property linked to his benefactor within the state.
Without any previous warning or administrative notice or procedures, fresh notices appeared on OGD’s residence and businesses: He was given three days to quit, three days to prepare for demolition. No prior warning, no notice to cure any ‘suspected’ defect in the permits, no phased compliance plan – just a royal proclamation that he “suspected” code violations and would be destroying the three multi–billion–Naira properties providing employment for hundreds of people, just on suspicion of code violations alone.
Once again, OGD, like David, refused to descend into anarchy, despite lots of anger and urgings from his loyal base to return fire for fire. When he learned that the demolitions were scheduled for a Sunday night, he did not assemble his own bulldozers or hire street militias. He walked, along with his lawyers, quietly but firmly, back to the temple of law and secured an order to halt the destruction.
Still, like Absalom thousands of years before him, Dapo Abiodun pressed on the path of his ruthless ambition to destroy the man sitting in the stool he covets for 2027.
In the next phase of hostility, Dapo’s government recklessly, and in disregard for the benefits that would be lost to Ogun State indigenes, began to frustrate development projects that Chief OGD, now a high-flying first-term senator, had attracted to the state through his clout in the red chamber and closeness to the office of the presidency* . Road contracts that promised thousands of jobs for indigenes were suddenly slapped with stop-work orders. Infrastructure that could have opened trade routes and lifted entire districts out of poverty was frozen, not because the people did not need it, but because the wrong man’s signature was on the facilitation documents. He later lamely claimed that the projects, some of which were not even yet built, were substandard.
Once again, Senator OGD, like David before him, rather than returning fire for fire, chose restraint. He issued statements, filed motions, met with elders, and warned quietly that when a governor lets personal grudges dictate policy, it is the state – not the enemy – that bleeds first.
Even when OGD applied for military protection to prevent a breakdown of security, law and order from kidnappers and suspected thugs, while he was on official assignment to review the federal projects introduced under his senatorial mandate, Governor Dapo inexplicably complained aloud about the presence of peace enforcers in his state. That really blew me away. A supposed chief security officer of a state is angry that security was guaranteed at an event having 10,000 people in an area where kidnappers and herdsmen had just operated in a few days according to published reprots?
In a season when every state is bombarding the president to send soldiers to protect them from kidnappers, herdsmen and violent touts, Ogun State governor was petitioning the military to complain that they ensured peace and tranquility at an event attended by over 10,000 people that could have led to bloodshed. No one was sure why a governor would complain about security forces overseeing a federal event.
Such was the pull of the Absalom Syndrome when it gets into full swing. As Absalom, the archetype of the Absalom Syndrome, himself showed, the patient literally loses all sense of reasoning and proportion.
To the discerning, the pattern was impossible to miss:
* A floundering candidate lifted from certain loss at the polls in a tightly contested governorship race;
* A governorship gained through another man’s networks;
* Then a relentless campaign to erase, humiliate and replace that very benefactor.
It was Absalom and David all over again – only this time, the names were different, and the warning clearer: When a man allows the Absalom Syndrome to consume him, it is rarely the David that dies first. Sooner or later, the one chasing his benefactor may find himself hanging, like Absalom, in the crooked branches of his own overreach.
A PROPHETIC WARNING TO GOV DAPO ABIODUN
There are moments in a man’s life when the road ahead is no longer a mystery. It is a mirror.
If Governor Abiodun cares to look closely, he will see that his path is beginning to look eerily like Absalom’s: a once-helped man, now burning his bridges to chase a throne that does not belong to him.
Yet it does not have to end that way.
For one thing, the reality on the ground is stubborn: the senatorial seat he covets is not an empty stool. It is held, and held firmly, by Chief Gbenga Daniel – the very man who made his own Governorship possible with a critical last-minute assist.
In the last election, Dapo Abiodun could not secure a single ward in that senatorial zone. OGD, by contrast, took the same terrain by landslide, and is now spoken of across the realm as one of the top three performing first-term senators in the entire country. This is the same senatorial area Dapo now thinks he can take from OGD. Indeed, Absalom Syndrome, as it did to Absalom himself, tends to give birth to delusions of grandeur.
Dapo should know that one-on-one in Ogun East, in a free and fairly contested ticket, OGD will crush him like a bug. Political records for the last 12 years will show that clearly.
Why, then, would any wise man choose to become a spoiler in a race he cannot win, even if the party handed him the ticket? Why insist on playing Absalom, charging at a seat that stubbornly refuses to be dislodged, while the people of the state lose jobs from stalled federal projects and toppled buildings?
If Dapo Abiodun truly loves his people more than his pride, there is a better way.
Instead of trying to destroy his benefactor, he could seek reconciliation and rethink the board. Chief Gbenga Daniel is not just any senator; he is widely regarded as a close ally of the current president, a cagey operator who has wisely wrapped himself in the colours of the president’s re-election campaign and second-term ambition. In the quiet corners of power, his voice carries.
A wise king would read the signs and say: “Instead of fighting this man for a seat I cannot take, let me sit with him and cut a better deal.”
*Dapo Abiodun could choose to lobby OGD, not to vacate the senate, but to link arms with him in a new pact – one that secures Dapo Abiodun a ministerial position in the president’s second term, while leaving the senatorial mandate in the hands that have already earned it. In that equation, everybody wins:*
– Dapo Abiodun gets to avoid the Absalom ending and stay relevant and powerful after his tenure, with a national platform instead of a local defeat.
– The senator continues his work in the upper chamber, leveraging his goodwill and presidential access.
– And most importantly, the people of their state gain twice – one son at the centre as minister, another in the senate as a proven performer.
Ogun’s citizens will not remember who first started the quarrel. They will remember who had the wisdom to end it in their favour.
There is, however, a darker cloud forming at the edge of the sky.
*NOw, Whispers in the capital suggest that the president himself is no longer amused. Dapo Abiodun’s unrelenting persecution of his own senator-ally from the same party is beginning to look, in the president’s eyes, like a direct threat to his second-term chances in the state* . And those who know the man behind the presidential smile know something else: when his re-election map is threatened, he does not move softly. When he finally acts, he acts with a cold, ruthless efficiency against anyone seen as endangering his return to power.
That is why the warning to Dapo Abiodun is simple: If he continues down this Absalom road – demolishing what his former political benefactor built, blocking what his benefactor brought, and undermining what his benefactor represents – he may not only lose the senate race he is obsessed with. He may also lose the trust of the very throne above him.
*We have seen the movie of the Absalom Syndrome repeat itself over the ages: The Syndrome always ends the same way: not with David’s destruction, but with Absalom hanging helplessly in the crooked branches of his own ambition* .
As a citizen of Ogun East senatorial zone myself, I am hereby joining others to blow the whistle for our governor to calm down, just like many other well-wishers, including prominent Obas and Chiefs, have been blowing this whistle for him to climb down from the Absalom Horse and find a better way. Instead, our modern day Absalom continues to gallop faster in pursuit of his David.
But as they say, the lost dog that will soon be destroyed by a bigger game will never listen to the whistle of the hunter.
Yes, Governor Dapo Abiodun still has time to climb down from that Absalom Horse.
The question is whether his pride will let him.
Dr. Ope Banwo
The Mayor Of Fadeyi
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