In recent times, many who seek to govern Ogun State do so from a place of entitlement assumed proximity to power, inherited influence, or ambition unsupported by vision. I do not share that approach.
I, Segun Showunmi, desire to lead Ogun State not because I feel entitled to it, but because I believe our state has been managed far below its potential. My aspiration is grounded in conviction, clarity, and a development philosophy I call Awolowo 2.0 leadership driven by planning, institutions, and measurable public value.
For nearly fifty years, Ogun State has enjoyed one of Nigeria’s greatest economic advantages: proximity to Lagos. That advantage has translated into factories, warehouses, industrial parks, and one of the strongest Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) profiles among states created in 1976. With ₦80–100 billion generated annually and a major manufacturing base, Ogun should today be growing at a pace comparable to Lagos.
It is not.
Instead, Ogun State presents a troubling paradox: industrial abundance sitting on infrastructural decay. Poor roads, weak urban planning, and underdeveloped public services coexist with multinational factories and logistics hubs. This is not a funding problem. It is a governance problem.
Growth by Accident, Not by Design
Ogun’s relative economic success has never been the product of intentional state policy. It is a spillover economy industries pushed outward by Lagos’ congestion, land prices, and regulation simply crossed the border. Ogun did not deliberately court them with a coherent industrial strategy; it merely received them.
That distinction matters.
States that grow by design invest deliberately in infrastructure, human capital, and long-term planning. States that grow by accident mistake good fortune for good governance. Ogun State has spent decades doing the latter.
The result is predictable: factories arrive, but roads collapse. Revenue increases, but public value remains invisible. Communities host billion-naira enterprises while navigating potholes, flooding, and unreliable services.
The Infrastructure Failure No One Can Defend
With its level of IGR, Ogun State should not have industrial corridors where roads are impassable. The Agbara–Atan–Igbesa axis, the Ota–Abeokuta corridor, and key routes through Sagamu and Ijebu Ode are economic lifelines. Their condition directly affects productivity, logistics costs, and investor confidence.
Yet year after year, infrastructure spending remains scattered, politicized, and short-term. Roads are built without maintenance plans. Projects are abandoned with every change of administration. There is no binding infrastructure sequence that survives elections.
This is not a question of intelligence or capacity. It is a question of priorities.
The Cost of Visionless Leadership
The most damaging failure in Ogun State is the absence of a long-term development vision that transcends individual governors. Each administration arrives with its own slogans and pet projects. None is bound by a 20- or 25-year master plan. Nothing compels continuity.
Lagos State understood this early. Its success is not accidental; it is institutional. Agencies, plans, and policies outlive governors. Ogun never built those institutions. Instead, it built an economy dependent on personalities.
That is why, fifty years after its creation, Ogun still behaves like a frontier state rather than a mature industrial hub.
Industry Without Integration
Ogun’s industrial landscape is poorly structured. Factories are scattered rather than clustered. Zoning is weak. Linkages to local employment, skills development, and supporting services are thin.
The state has failed to answer a basic question: What exactly do we want to be?
Is Ogun Nigeria’s manufacturing backbone? Its logistics corridor? Its agro-processing hub? The answer cannot be “everything, everywhere.” Without deliberate specialization and enforced clustering, infrastructure costs rise and local benefits shrink.
The Missed Opportunity of Lagos
Perhaps Ogun’s greatest strategic error is pretending it is economically independent of Lagos. It is not and never will be. Ogun is part of a single metropolitan and industrial ecosystem with Lagos, yet there is no serious joint transport, logistics, or urban planning framework.
While Lagos plans rail, BRT, and freight corridors, Ogun reacts instead of co-designing. In doing so, it condemns itself to permanent second-tier status.
What Must Change: Awolowo 2.0
Ogun State does not need miracles. It needs discipline.
Awolowo 2.0 means legally binding long-term planning that no governor can casually discard. It means ring-fencing a significant share of IGR for high-impact infrastructure, especially industrial and intercity roads. It means intentional industrial clustering, enforced zoning, and alignment between private investment and public infrastructure. It means institutions that matter more than individuals.
Most of all, it means rejecting entitlement politics the idea that power is inherited, assumed, or owed and replacing it with purposeful leadership anchored in competence, continuity, and courage.
Living Below Our Potential
Ogun State should today be one of Nigeria’s most dynamic subnational economies a manufacturing and logistics engine for West Africa. Instead, it remains a state living below its potential, sustained by geography rather than vision.
That is not a tragedy of fate.
It is a failure of governance.
And until Ogun confronts that truth honestly and boldly no number of factories or revenue figures will change the daily reality of its people.
That confrontation is why I seek to lead.
Otunba Segun Showunmi
The Alternative.
