Akeredolu at 70: The man who trusted me with his voice, By Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú

I make no apology for the loyalty I had for this man, in his life and in his passing. It has become fashionable in Nigerian public discourse to treat loyalty as naivety, and betrayal as sophistication. I reject that inversion. I believe “it is better to be hanged for loyalty than to be rewarded for betrayal”. Akeredolu extended trust to me without reservation; the least I owe his memory is an unflinching account of who he was and what he stood for, offered without the hedging that so often passes for balance.

Today, 21 July, marks what would have been the 70th birthday of Arakunrin Oluwarotimi Odunayo Akeredolu (SAN, CON), former Governor of Ondo State. He is not here to receive the tributes that will fill timelines and newspaper columns, but the occasion demands an honest accounting of the man, his convictions, and what he built, not as sentiment, but as record.

I served him first as Commissioner for Regional Integration and Diaspora Relations, and later as Commissioner for Information. In both offices, he extended a trust that is rare in Nigerian public life. He did not simply assign me a portfolio; he handed me his voice. He allowed me to write his speeches, to shape the public narrative of his administration and of Ondo State, without demanding that I dilute his convictions to suit convenience. In a political culture where principals often surround themselves with aides they manage rather than aides they believe in, Akeredolu chose to believe. That distinction mattered then, and it matters now.

The making of a governor. Born on 21 July, 1956, in Owo, to the Reverend JO Ola Akeredolu and Lady Evangelist Grace Akeredolu, he was educated at Government School Owo; Aquinas College, Akure; Loyola College Ibadan; and Comprehensive High School Ayetoro, before earning his Law degree at the University of Ife, now Obafemi Awolowo University. Called to the Nigerian Bar in 1978 and conferred with the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria in 1998, he served as Ondo State’s Attorney-General and later as President of the Nigerian Bar Association, a tenure in which he did not hesitate to confront the presidency itself on questions of fitness to govern. He earned the sobriquet “Mr Talk and Do” because he treated a public promise and its fulfillment as a single, indivisible obligation. He rejected the honorific “Your Excellency” and insisted on “Arakunrin” – brother, a deliberate refusal to let the trappings of office widen the distance between himself and the people he served.

Moral courage as governance. As Chairman of the Southern Governors’ Forum and of his fellow South-West governors, Akeredolu placed himself at the front of the region’s demand for equity within the Nigerian federation. When insecurity spread across the forests of the South-West, he did not wait on Abuja’s permission to act. He convened his colleagues around the establishment of Amotekun, the Western Nigeria Security Network, on the conviction that a people must take responsibility for their own safety before they can credibly demand anything else of a distant center. That was moral courage rendered as policy, not rhetoric. He carried the same disposition into the daily work of governing – infrastructure, education, healthcare, agriculture but the larger inheritance was a standard; that leadership is measured by character, not by the volume of praise it commands. He tested his own decisions against that standard, and he tested mine.

The man beneath the office. He was also, unapologetically, a man of humour and of song. He had a joke ready for nearly any occasion and a gift for reading a room the instant tension entered it, defusing it before anyone else had named the discomfort. He sang, and sang well, often breaking into song in the middle of otherwise serious meetings, as if to insist that gravity and joy were not adversaries. When he sensed that I had grown tense under the weight of an assignment, he had a particular way of putting me at ease with a joke, a knowing look, understanding, correctly, that fear produces poor judgment and ease produces clear thinking. His public pronouncements on federalism, regional autonomy, and the dignity of the Yorùbá nation within Nigeria continue to be quoted by people who never sat in his cabinet, a testament to a mind that paired a lawyer’s precision with genuine memorability.

On loyalty. I make no apology for the loyalty I had for this man, in his life and in his passing. It has become fashionable in Nigerian public discourse to treat loyalty as naivety, and betrayal as sophistication. I reject that inversion. I believe “it is better to be hanged for loyalty than to be rewarded for betrayal”. Akeredolu extended trust to me without reservation; the least I owe his memory is an unflinching account of who he was and what he stood for, offered without the hedging that so often passes for balance.

He died on 26 December, 2023, in Germany, after a protracted illness he fought first privately and then, unavoidably, in public view. Ondo State, the South-West, and Nigeria lost a man who refused, to his final breath, to separate conviction from action. Today he turns 70 in the memory of every aide he trusted, every policy he insisted on seeing through, and in this account, offered by one who was proud to serve him and remains proud to have been loyal.

Bámidélé Adémólá-Olátéjú, a former Commissioner for Information in Ondo State, is director of New Media and Corporate Services of the All Progressives Congress (APC).