Iyabo Obasanjo’s Quiet Argument

By Remi Ladigbolu

There are seasons in public life when a candidacy becomes more than ambition. It becomes a reckoning with memory. For Professor Iyabo Obasanjo, the road to the Ogun State governorship is unfolding in such a season.

In Lambe, Alagbole, Akute, Oke Aro, Adiyan, Agbado and Ijoko, frustration is not abstract. It rises from flooded streets during the rains and dust clouds in the dry months. It sits in traffic that should not exist. It lingers in the feeling that proximity to Lagos ought to mean opportunity, yet too often delivers congestion without coordination.

She does not dismiss those grievances. She accepts them as valid.

The roads that bind those communities together are state roads. For the record, they fall within the jurisdiction of the Ogun State Government, not the federal trunk network overseen by the Federal Ministry of Works. Clarifying that is not an attempt to wave away complaints. It is simply to locate responsibility where the constitution places it.

That distinction is important because Professor Obasanjo’s years in public office were spent in roles with defined limits.

As Ogun State Commissioner for Health from 2003 to 2007, she operated within an executive structure. She did not design the state’s capital works agenda. She reported to a governor. Her focus was preventive healthcare, vaccination drives, public health awareness and strengthening primary care systems. The work was often quiet, rarely dramatic, but it touched communities at their most vulnerable moments.

Her tenure in the Senate from 2007 to 2011 carried a different mandate. A legislator does not award contracts. A senator does not supervise asphalt. The job description is lawmaking, oversight and policy direction.

In the 6th Senate, she chaired the Senate Committee on Health. She led deliberations on the National Health Bill and presented committee reports during plenary. The harmonisation process between Senate and House versions was not glamorous work, but it formed part of the early legislative architecture that later underpinned Nigeria’s national health reform framework.

She sponsored and co-sponsored bills aimed at regulating tobacco use, strengthening medical professional standards, defining emergency medical rights and amending the legal framework of NAFDAC.

ADVERTISEMENT

Beyond health, she introduced legislation touching poverty reduction, child welfare, hydro power producing areas, grazing reserve development, personal privacy protection and public records management.

None of these were ribbon cutting exercises. They were structural interventions. They were attempts to shape systems rather than score moments.

It is also worth saying plainly that sustainable development is not achieved by inserting isolated line items into budgets for political visibility. Real impact comes from strengthening institutions, improving oversight, influencing appropriation priorities at a broader level and pushing policies that attract long term investment into underserved areas. Roads that endure are usually the outcome of systems that work, not of one-off gestures.

It is true that over the years, public expectation has shifted. Many citizens now measure representation by visible projects rather than legislative influence. Constituency interventions have blurred constitutional lines. In earlier dispensations, before the present culture hardened, there was at least a stronger insistence on fiscal probity and clearer separation of powers. That culture has evolved, not always for the better.

Yet even within those constraints, she believes more could have been done to keep certain communities louder in national conversations. She says as much privately and publicly. Acknowledging limitation is not weakness. It is maturity.

The axis bordering Lagos holds strategic economic importance for Ogun State. It is a gateway corridor. It carries workers, small manufacturers, traders and families who power both states. When roads there fail, productivity falls. When drainage collapses, commerce slows. When planning is absent, growth becomes disorder.

She has made it clear that if entrusted with executive authority, that corridor will not remain peripheral in planning calculations. The neglect it has experienced over decades deserves redress. Not cosmetic grading before elections, but durable infrastructure tied to drainage, transport planning and economic zoning.

Her intervention, she insists, would not stop at that axis. Other parts of Ogun State carry similar stories of deferred maintenance and postponed attention. The governorship, in her view, is not about spotlighting one grievance over another. It is about building a coordinated infrastructure plan that recognises proximity to Lagos as an asset to be structured, not endured.

There is also the quieter layer of her public life. Through the Iyanuwura Foundation, she has supported education initiatives and community development efforts across parts of the state. Traditional rulers and local leaders have acknowledged those interventions. They are not substitutes for state responsibility, but they reflect a pattern of engagement that predates this campaign.

The larger question before voters is not whether frustration exists. It does. It is whether the next governor should be judged solely on asphalt laid in a previous office that did not control asphalt, or on a broader record of institutional engagement and a stated willingness to confront neglected corridors with executive authority.

Professor Iyabo Obasanjo has also outlined a practical approach to addressing the infrastructure deficit she acknowledges across the state. Her plan is to establish road construction and maintenance crews led by qualified Nigerian engineers, with at least one dedicated crew operating within each senatorial district. Recognising the unique pressures created by Lagos’ outward expansion, the heavily urbanised corridors in Ifo Local Government and Ado-Odo-Ota Local Government would each have specialised crews focused exclusively on their road networks.

The programme is designed not only to accelerate repairs and construction but also to create opportunity. Unemployed young people from the affected communities would be recruited into the crews and paid a daily living allowance, with those who demonstrate consistent participation over a three-month period transitioning into permanent salaried roles. In this way, road rehabilitation, youth employment and community participation would be pursued together, addressing multiple challenges through a single coordinated response.

Her candidacy is still in its early stretch. Campaign seasons are long. Records will be examined again and again. What remains constant is her acknowledgement that communities like Lambe and Akute deserve inclusion, prioritisation and dignity in planning.

In politics, tone often determines trajectory. She has chosen not to trade anger for anger. She has chosen to rest her case on record, on constitutional clarity and on a promise that proximity to Lagos should finally become an advantage for Ogun’s border communities, not a sentence to permanent gridlock.

The road to Oke Mosan is long. So too is the memory of communities who feel overlooked. Whether that memory becomes resentment or renewal will depend on who convinces them that this time, governance will be both structured and visible.

*Ladigbolu is a Lagos-based journalist.