Governor Seyi Makinde arrived as a soft-spoken alternative, a wealthy private-sector man who promised to run Oyo like a business after three failed attempts at power. Seven years later, what Oyo got is not a manager but an emperor. Power has not humbled him, it has intoxicated him. And that intoxication has turned him into what many in Yoruba politics now openly call a rebel and a betrayer.
The rebellion is in two directions. First, against his own political lineage. Second, against those who made him.
Makinde’s war against President Bola Tinubu is no longer ordinary opposition politics. It is a tribal revolt that evokes the darkest chapter of Western Region history, the Akintola versus Awolowo crisis that led to Operation Wetie. At the opposition summit he hosted in Ibadan, Makinde declared, “For those that are carrying on as if there’s no tomorrow, they should remember that Operation Wetie started from here. This is the same Wild Wild West.” He claimed he was warning against a one-party state and defending democracy, recalling how Ibadan in the 1950s was the home of constitutional debates.
The ruling APC, through Felix Morka, called it what it was, “baseless, reckless, and a clear and present threat to peace and national security.” But beyond Abuja, Yoruba elders heard something more dangerous, a son threatening to burn his father’s house. His campaign organization went further, branding 32 governors supporting Tinubu as a Nebuchadnezzar Coalition and an alliance of failed governors. He has vowed to defeat Tinubu across battleground states in 2027 under the Allied Peoples Movement coalition and openly ruled out any support for Tinubu’s re-election, saying his final break came after FCT Minister Nyesom Wike vowed to “hold the PDP” for Tinubu in a private meeting.
Like Ladoke Akintola who broke with Obafemi Awolowo to align with the North and plunged the West into chaos, Makinde is now seeking a Northern-led coalition to stop the first Yoruba president in 16 years from getting a second term. It is not strategy, it is betrayal. And like Akintola, he forgets that Wild Wild West never spares the man who lights the first fire.
The second betrayal is closer to home and it has earned him the tag of the ultimate ingrate, a master of use-and-dump. Oyo politics today is littered with men who carried Makinde on their shoulders and were dumped once he entered Government House. The latest case is the OYSIEC and APM saga. Makinde dissolved the Oyo State Independent Electoral Commission, whose members had statutory tenure, and rejected the Allied Peoples Movement local government primary candidates backed by his former close ally Rasaq Olopoeyan. The move triggered resignations of appointees who felt used and dumped. Yet the same APM he humiliated is the same party vehicle he is now dusting up for his own 2027 presidential ambition. This is not new. Two hours after his swearing-in on May 29, 2019, he sacked 33 elected local government councils produced by the APC, in defiance of a High Court judgment of May 6, 2019. ALGON had to write to banks warning of contempt and sued him. He did the same to OYSIEC in 2019. He used anti-Ajimobi sentiment to win, sidelined traditional rulers and stakeholders, and centralized power. Everyone who brought him has been discarded.
Around this character of rebellion and betrayal now hangs a cloud of thuggery and unaccounted billions. Oyo under Makinde has seen a spate of political killings that has returned the state to its dark days. The state-backed Park Management System, presented as a transport reform, is now accused by the opposition of being a political militia. On October 16, 2026, Ridwan Adeyemo, a commercial motorcyclist and APC loyalist in Ward 06, Ibadan South West, was hacked to death in broad daylight after his attackers reportedly questioned his party loyalty, with APC alleging links to a relative of a top PMS official. Before that, thugs disrupted an APC gathering in Ile-Tuntun, Ibadan South East, killing three and destroying campaign vehicles. In Molete, Accord Party supporters were stoned during a procession. In May 2026, there were school abductions and killings in Oriire Local Government. When APC Publicity Secretary Olawale Sadare blamed Makinde for weakening grassroots security, the government through Deputy Governor Bayo Lawal dismissed it as politically motivated fabrication and said criminality has no political identity and joint teams are deployed. But the blood on the streets tells a different story.
The financial allegations are even weightier and they all involve the same figure, N50 billion, repeated like a bad omen. FCT Minister Wike claimed on television in September 2026 that the Tinubu administration gave Oyo N50 billion to upgrade the Samuel Ladoke Akintola Airport to international standards, to show Makinde benefits from Tinubu. Makinde called it completely false, saying the approval was at no cost to the Federal Government and the airport is 100 percent Oyo funded. Then former Ekiti Governor Ayodele Fayose and the Oyo APC accused Makinde of receiving N50 billion federal intervention after the January 2024 Bodija explosion, keeping it secret, disbursing only N4.5 billion to victims and diverting the rest to his 2027 presidential ambition. The government countered that only N30 billion was released, N20 billion withheld, and that N4.5 billion was 15 percent direct payout while N25.5 billion went to reconstruction and road repairs.
These sit alongside two other national disputes. Makinde claimed the Federal Government is withholding N250 billion per state in NLNG dividends until after 2027. The Presidency dismissed it as economically illogical, saying it would require N9 trillion payout, while Makinde’s camp demanded an account of $3 billion received under Tinubu. He also countered Tinubu’s claim of giving N570 billion hardship grants to states, clarifying it was a World Bank NG-CARES COVID-19 recovery loan reimbursement, not federal largesse. Add his 2019 controversies, when he claimed he inherited N150 billion debt and threatened that Ajimobi would be stoned, while Ajimobi’s aides said the debt was N90 billion and that Makinde himself borrowed N10 billion within two months, plus his N48 billion asset declaration that made him Africa’s richest governor overnight and forced the Code of Conduct Bureau director Moses Atolagbe to say he awaited verification from Abuja.
The most detailed indictment has now come from within, from former Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Chief Mutalubi Ojo Adebayo, SAN, who is now campaigning for the APC. Adebayo accused Makinde of diverting local government funds and rendering councils comatose, abandoning the Ogbere-Amuloko-Akanran-Ilaji-Ogun State border road corridor to spite private interests and describing its users as people who have their thinking apparatuses at the soles of their feet, describing hospitals as pigsties with financial pilfering, pointing to breakdown in education with the School Governing Board model abandoned and resignations in the Education Trust Fund implying wrongdoing, targeting lack of transparency in the surveillance aircraft procurement where security advisers were allegedly kept in dark, and criticizing the Circular Road review, Operation Light Up Oyo and Lekan Salami Stadium. The government, in a statement titled Lies Have Short Legs by Special Adviser Dr Sulaimon Olanrewaju on October 18, 2026, called Adebayo’s remarks reckless, insulting, disrespectful to health workers and speculative, insisting the border road is a World Bank-supported rural access corridor that cannot be abandoned to spite, joint state-LG funding is lawful and necessary, hospitals were upgraded and insurance strengthened, WAEC improved and more teachers employed than any previous administration with LAUTECH resolved, the Board model was integrated and resignation does not equal misconduct, the aircraft followed protocols and Executive Council approval with Amotekun strengthened, and that Circular Road must be renegotiated if concessionaire fails while lighting decisions were based on cost and stadium hosted internationals. It added that Adebayo is free to support any candidate, even one who is clearly addled and patently incompetent, but has no licence to twist facts and reduce governance to beer parlour gossip unbecoming of a SAN.
Makinde calls all this constructive criticism. But when a governor’s record is defined by killings linked to his transport enforcers, by N50 billion claims and counter-claims, by accusations from his own former Attorney-General, by use-and-dump of allies like Olopoeyan, and by open rebellion against his kinsman President, history starts to write its verdict.
If Bola Tinubu wins re-election in 2027, that verdict will become an audit. The federal tolerance Makinde enjoys today will disappear. The N50 billion airport money, the Bodija N30 billion, the N250 billion NLNG claim, the N570 billion loan, the LG joint accounts, the surveillance aircraft, all will be placed on the table. Like Akintola who thought federal backing would save him after betraying Awolowo, Makinde may learn too late that Operation Wetie consumes its author first. The emperor may have conquered Oyo, but he is about to discover he cannot conquer Nigeria by betraying his tribe.
