Otunba Gbenga Daniel, generally known and called OGD by his numerous admirers, is a sort of enigma, tending towards a phenomenon as a result of his many-faceted personality traits, to many people, friends, and foes. From a distance, away from him and his politics, where he sometimes has to ruffle with charlatans, characters of low esteem, beyond a transient occupation of power without authority, he is a newsmaker, especially to pen pushers, masquerading as journalists. They just love to write about him in lucid and lurid prose. I hope the University of Lagos-trained Mechanical Engineer, turned hotelier, may one day turn the gubernatorial journalistic bits on him to a literary work of ‘faction’, a literary genre that mixes facts with a large dose of fiction about people, events, and politics, to a readable work of history. I guess the Ijebu-born quintessential politician should be able to make ‘more money’ from it with his mythical midal touch.
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Today, and in comparative terms, OGD is the main issue in Ogun politics, with his many giant strides that has come to redefine the programmatic architecture of the state that once went with a demeaning tag of a ‘civil servants’ state, where rental services, of tables, chairs, canopies, and ‘awon olopo’ was a major industry in the services of high-heeled indigenes who, from their Lagos and Ibadan comfort zones, on weekends, invaded their ancestral homesteads of Abeokuta, Ijebu-Ode, Sagamu, Ilaro, and many of the signposted (this way too…) towns to bury departed ones.
As governor, for 8 years, from 2003-2011, he left enviable footprints in the indelible sands of time in projects and policy initiations that looked towards the future of socio-economic development. And he could not have done less, given the array of technocrats and clear-headed ideologues that he was able to attract from the 5th floor of his KrestaLaurel workstation, where his giant-slaying political machine was jumpstarted in Gateway Front Foundation (GFF), a non-governmental organization that impacted so much on the existential lives of many Ogun residents, especially in healthcare-related interventions in the rural communities. Truth is the administration of Justus Olugbenga Daniel, to the day, remains a reference period in governance along the trajectory of utilitarian ethos. He simply considered everything that could add value to people and the political economy of Ogun state doable. ‘Consider it done’ was a familiar refrain associated with him, then and now. And many individuals took undue advantage of the generous spirit of this newly minted Senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, sent forth from Ogun East senatorial district. He surely will be a fresh breadth in a largely dull and uninspiring chamber. The debate is bound to take a new Socrates dialectical form.
Give it to him, he is an organized man, with a knack for details, in all things he chooses to be interested in, giving attention to the least essential, including the provision of a toothpick on the dining table, where guests may even prefer to pick meat stuck in-between their teeth with their fingers. Often ‘overprepared’, with eyes set on the goal, he is always sure to arrive, successfully, at a given destination.
Today, he turns a year older, with emotional scars from unrelieved persecution from known and hidden political opponents, but with head unbowed, and trust in his God for a more glorious future, lying-in-wait, at a rendezvous to keep his appointed date with destiny.
As he marches on, after being dragged through the courts, motivated by malice in an act of political settlements, he surely must strive on to leave a legacy of good services to our common humanity, What remains for me is to wish my ‘political punching bag’, a benefactor of immense proportion, a happy birthday and many happy returns of the day
– Prof Akinyemi Onigbinde,
‘Titilola Ayoka Lodge’
Ilepa, Ifo, Ogun state.
06-04-2023
