Hon Shittu Ibrahim: An Unexpected Storm | By Sola Abegunde

It must have been very early last year when I wrote a piece titled ”The Massive Wind Against Governor Makinde”.

I remember that the governor’s camp went into a frenzy as a result of the impact of that piece.

If my memory serves me right, that was the period Pastor Sulaimon Olanrewaju, the governor’s special adviser on media, conjured different names like ‘Beelzebub’, ‘the Masquerade Man’ and all sorts of names and affixed them to my identity.

Very interesting times that was.

If Governor Makinde was unsettled by just a whirlwind, I wonder how they are going to respond now that I see a storm heading in the direction of the governor.

When I conceived the idea of writing this piece, having listened to the Hon. Shittu Ibrahim’s interview on Saturday, several catchy headlines competed in my mind.

I was almost tempted to title this piece ‘A Tale Of The Porcupine‘.

You will wonder what the correlation is between the interview of Hon. Shittu and a porcupine.

Honestly, I see Governor Seyi Makinde as a replica of the porcupine.

When you kill a porcupine, you don’t need extra efforts of gathering firewood to take care of it.

The porcupine’s quills are enough to do the needful.

That is why Yorubas always say, ‘funra Oore nii se igi ti a fi nwii’.

Governor Seyi Makinde knows where to do the enchantment for a bountiful sale of his products (oogun awure), but his character is impeding the effectiveness of the enchantment.

Governor Makinde built a propaganda machine around himself, but he overlooked the fact that such a machine is also capable of self-destruction.

He doesn’t seem to know that uncontrolled propaganda is capable of making the one who orchestrated it forget his limitations and get reckless.

He has forgotten that as a mortal, you cannot have everything under your control.

In one word, Governor Seyi Makinde’s undoing is the failure to prepare for unforeseen circumstances, the kind that Hon. Shittu now represents.

To Governor Makinde, once you have a docile House of Assembly, a ‘Man Friday’ as Speaker, an almost completely corrupted media and so much money to throw around, then the world is at your feet.

Alas! He got things completely wrong.

Like I said, I listened to the interview of Hon. Shittu yesterday, and I will come back to it later.

However, I must say that I am surprised that a lot of people are actually shocked that Governor Makinde has run Oyo State into monumental debts.

I have been saying this for a long time.

Thank God all the same for Hon. Shittu.

Now, I think we are all underestimating the extent of damage Governor Makinde has brought to Oyo State if we limit the scourge of debts to the state level.

What of the 33 local governments?

Sometime last year, I heard that even the 33 local governments are not immune from Governor Makinde’s reckless borrowings to the extent that he had signed letters of irrevocable credit to certain banks in respect of the 33 local governments.

I have kept challenging the governor, as a matter of fact, to confirm or deny this fact, but he has never provided answers.

It is common knowledge that local government administration under Governor Makinde has gone comatose.

It is also common knowledge that just as monthly allocations to the states have increased, monthly allocations to local governments have also increased tremendously.

The question is, where are all these humongous amounts of money going on a monthly basis?

We all know how Governor Makinde reacted to the judgement of the Supreme Court, which granted financial autonomy for local governments.

According to my findings, Governor Makinde became agitated because that judgement, if enforced, will expose his shenanigans of the mismanagement of the local government funds.

Now that attention has been focused on the debt profile of Oyo State, I urge everyone who will be challenging the governor to include the probable debts of the 33 local governments.

How could local governments that have been receiving billions of naira as monthly allocations for years be in debt despite the fact that most of them, if not all, have no project to show for the received monthly allocations?

With Hon. Shittu, Governor Makinde and his lackeys have bitten off more than they can chew.

Even his star ‘afenutobase’ are still grappling with how to come to his aid through their radio programmes.

The gentleman, contrary to Sulaimon Olanrewaju and the Oyo State House of Assembly, is very cool, calculative and meticulous.

During the interview, he was able to provide details, facts and figures which exposed the governor’s spokesperson and the Oyo State House of Assembly as an incompetent bunch and cheap liars.

Like I said the other time, this is the first time Governor Makinde’s media handlers are facing this kind of test, and they are failing woefully.

That is another disadvantage of relying too much on propaganda.

It tends to make you lose your guard and become too comfortable, weak and vulnerable when you are faced with unexpected challenges.

Hon. Shittu was able to expose the shenanigans of the Oyo State House of Assembly and the Governor through the WhatsApp notice of plenary, which the Majority Leader claimed the Oyo State House of Assembly relied upon to say that Hon. Shittu failed to attend the plenary of August 29th even though he was duly notified.

Hon. Shittu pointed out that even though the notice talked about a plenary on Tuesday, August 19, and the operational word was ‘today, Tuesday’, the screenshot of the WhatsApp message of the Majority Leader actually bore the date of Monday, August 18, 2025.

What a shame!

In fact, that singular fraud has removed common sense and integrity from whatever is said by the House of Assembly and the Oyo State Government, and they mustn’t be taken seriously henceforth.

The foundation not only rocked, it fell flat, but that is not the end of the show of shame.

A document has been circulated which showed that only thirteen members of the Oyo State House of Assembly sat on 19th August, and all of them are from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

There is more. Hon. Shittu said while they have a defective ‘notice’ for the supposed plenary for 19th August, he challenges the Oyo State House of Assembly to publish the notice for 26th August when the 300 billion Naira loan was perfected.

I am waiting for the Oyo State House of Assembly to pick up this challenge.

A lot of people have been concerned about the series of loans obtained by Governor Seyi Makinde since Hon. Shittu blew the whistle, but as bad and alarming as the figures are, the most shocking part is the criminal manner in which the Oyo State House of Assembly and Governor Makinde have been going about the approvals for the loans.

Hon. Shittu alleged that on the 13th of March, 2025, the Oyo State House of Assembly, without a notification for plenary, approved a loan of 200 billion Naira for Governor Makinde.

He said he got to know about the sad loan when he saw the votes and proceedings of what was supposed to be the last sitting before the exposure.

He claimed he saw that his name was marked absent just as many other members’ were and that he queried the Majority Leader of the House about the anomaly.

If this information is correct, then we have been in soup for a very long time, and it suggests that the Governor of Oyo State is in cahoots with a few members of the Oyo State House of Assembly, and they have been taking loan upon loan without due process.

At any rate, I will definitely forward a petition to the Economics and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC, about this unfortunate drama unravelling before our very eyes.

Hon. Shittu also talked about a particular 72 million dollar loan which was allegedly taken from Afribank.

Though, he claimed he doesn’t have details of the transaction.

He went further to say that the supposed plenary of the 26th August was to cover up for whatever happened on the 19th August and that he only saw a hint about a purported sitting of the House of Assembly of the 26th on the Instagram page of the Speaker!

Like I said, my main concern is not the amount of loans, as outrageous as they are, but I’m more concerned about the details of the expositions of Hon. Shittu.

If his claims are correct, then we have a syndicate, a cabal, a bunch of criminals who have been condemning the future of generations of Oyo State to debts that accrue through loans obtained by fraud.

Whatever you obtain without due process is fraud.

When Makinde became governor in 2019, the resources of the state were thin as a result of certain economic factors.

If he would prioritise the payments of salaries and allowances for civil servants, which indeed are sacrosanct, he would definitely be restricted from embarking on ambitious projects till the resources of the state improved.

Unfortunately, he had made commitments beyond his knowledge of governance during the campaign.

He also wanted to show that he was better than Ajimobi as a governor, and that was the beginning of the problem.

Governor Makinde had to keep his promises to the civil servants, not because he genuinely loves them but because he wanted to prove a point.

At the same time, he embarked on a series of ambitious but, most often, misplaced priority projects like the bus terminals, Light Up Oyo and several other projects.

The costs of all these projects were unbelievably outrageous, and that is when Governor Makinde realised that he had to be borrowing to maintain a fake identity.

Not only that, Governor Makinde gradually began to transit from a governor of one of the states in the South West to the leader of his political party in the South West, a power broker and now a rumoured presidential candidate.

The National Convention of the PDP will be held in Ibadan by this November, and that is a big deal.

If anyone thinks that Governor Makinde doesn’t need more and more money to sustain his transited identity, such a person must be politically naive.

So, why won’t Oyo State suffer under Governor Makinde?

I hope the Oyo State House of Assembly will come out and do so quickly to defend the series of serious allegations raised by Hon. Shittu.

I also hope they won’t consider suspending him.

At this point, the Oyo State House of Assembly must make public the details of all the loans they have approved for Governor Makinde since 2019 and also provide us with the votes and proceedings of how the requests for the loans were processed.

It is equally important that media houses who are still with the masses should be demanding the reports of oversights on the projects attached to the string of loans.

I will no longer ask Governor Makinde to tell us the specific amounts Oyo Statecurrently owes as debts.

We all now know that we have crossed over to the realm of trillions.

The only question would be, how many trillion?

Whether the Oyo State House of Assembly responds to Hon. Shittu or not, they definitely will hear from me.

SOLA ABEGUNDE.