When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s visit to Ogun State was confirmed for Saturday, April 4, Governor Dapo Abiodun did not reach for a scorecard of governance achievements. He reached for his phone, and summoned transport union leaders in the dead of night.
Apples Bite Magazine can exclusively reveal that Governor Abiodun convened a clandestine midnight meeting on Tuesday with key leaders of transport unions operating across Ogun State, issuing a blunt directive; mobilise your members, print placards, and show up to denounce Senator Ibikunle Amosun, Senator Otunba Gbenga Daniel, and every figure the Governor currently considers a threat within the APC fold in the state. The goal was not civic expression. It was political theatre, a carefully choreographed show of force designed to send one message to the visiting President; I am in control of Ogun State, and I have the streets.
Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting confirmed to this publication that the gathering was held entirely outside regular political channels, deliberately so. No formal party structure was involved. No ward executives. No LGA chairmen. Just the Governor and the men who control the buses, the motorcycles, and the motor parks. The instruction was simple and transactional: deliver bodies, deliver noise, deliver placards bearing the names of his political enemies, and make sure the cameras catch it when the President’s motorcade rolls in on Saturday.
The transport unions, long known as a dependable mobilisation tool for whoever controls government patronage in Nigerian states, were the perfect instrument. They are organised, distributed across every local government, and their members are economically dependent on the goodwill of state government. Saying no is rarely an option.
The timing of the midnight meeting is itself instructive. President Tinubu’s visit, initially scheduled for Wednesday, April 2, was postponed after the President moved to personally address the deteriorating security situation in Plateau State. That postponement gave Abiodun a narrow but critical window. With the visit now locked in for Saturday and the President set to inaugurate the Gateway International Cargo Airport in Iperu-Ilishan alongside other projects, Abiodun moved fast. Tuesday night’s meeting was the product of that urgency, a governor scrambling to construct a political narrative before the most important audience he will face this season arrives in his state.
The airport inauguration gives the visit a legitimate ceremonial anchor. But for Abiodun, the infrastructure is secondary. What matters is what plays out on the sidelines, who is seen, who is cheered, who is denounced, and what picture of Ogun State’s political reality is painted for the President before he arrives. To understand the desperation behind this midnight manoeuvre, you must understand the political quicksand Dapo Abiodun currently stands in.
His relationship with Amosun, his political godfather turned sworn adversary, remains one of the most corrosive fault lines in APC’s southwestern politics. Amosun has never forgiven what he sees as Abiodun’s betrayal and has spent years engineering opposition to him from within and without the party. OGD, the elder statesman of Ogun East politics and now a Senator, represents another gravitational force that Abiodun cannot fully neutralise, particularly with 2027 beginning to cast long shadows over every political calculation in the state. Tinubu’s visit is therefore not just a presidential engagement. For Abiodun, it is an audition. A moment to demonstrate to the President, his most critical federal patron, that the street belongs to him, that the opposition figures are isolated, and that Ogun State is his firmly held territory. The placards denouncing Amosun and OGD were not designed for the people of Ogun State. They were designed for one man seated in a presidential motorcade.
Here is what makes this story particularly revealing: the very transport union members being mobilised to proclaim Abiodun’s dominance are the same constituency that stayed with him even through his most turbulent political moments, including the bruising 2023 election cycle where his grip on the state was anything but certain. That these are the people he is deploying to manufacture a show of popular support tells you everything about the depth, or rather the shallowness, of that support. When a governor must conduct midnight negotiations with union bosses to simulate public enthusiasm, the enthusiasm is not real. When placards must be commissioned rather than volunteered, the message they carry is hollow. This is not a show of strength. It is a confession of weakness dressed in borrowed clothes.
Political observers in the state who spoke to this publication were unsparing in their assessment. “If Abiodun had genuine popular support, he would not need to drag transport workers out with placards to prove it to a visiting President,” one source told Apples Bite Magazine. “This is the kind of thing you do when you know the ground is not solid under your feet.” The optics carry real risk. Tinubu, himself a generational political strategist with decades of reading crowds, mobilisations, and the difference between organic support and manufactured noise, is unlikely to be fooled by what amounts to a roadside performance. If anything, the spectacle may communicate precisely the opposite of what Abiodun intends: that a governor who must resort to midnight union deals to demonstrate control is a governor who does not actually have it.
What this episode exposes is not merely a tactical misstep ahead of a presidential visit. It is a window into how the Abiodun administration approaches political survival, not through the weight of delivery, not through the confidence of genuine grassroots loyalty, but through the management of appearances and the manipulation of structures that depend on state patronage to exist. As Saturday approaches and President Tinubu prepares to inaugurate the Gateway International Cargo Airport at Iperu-Ilishan, the people of Ogun State deserve to know what is being staged in their name. The placards will be loud. The crowd will be present. But behind it all is a midnight deal, a desperate calculation, and a governor who needed union bosses, not the people, to build his show of force.
Apples Bite International Magazine will continue to monitor developments around the April 4 presidential visit and its political fallout across Ogun State.
READ ALSO:
