SSACO’s latest response, despite several paragraphs of statistics, accusations and self-congratulation, still fails to answer the central question that has haunted the Oyo AHEAD manifesto from the beginning.
What is the original idea?
This was contained in a statement issued and signed by the Co-Director, Media and Publicity, Oyo State APM Campaign Council, Dr Sulaimon Olanrewaju, made available to newsmen on Thursday.
No one disputes Senator Sharafadeen Alli’s résumé. No one disputes that he once served as a Local Government Chairman, though he failed to pay primary school teachers their due salaries. No one is denying that he once served as Secretary to the State Government, though he lost a rank and was demoted to the position of Chief of Staff. No one denies that he is now a Senator, where his achievement is largely the erection of billboards.
But public office is not an achievement in itself. It is an opportunity to make achievements.
The issue before the people of Oyo State is not whether Senator Alli has occupied offices. The issue is whether his manifesto offers a vision that is demonstrably superior to what already exists.
So far, the answer remains no.
What makes SSACO’s latest statement even more curious is its attempt to shift the conversation from originality to biography. We are told that Senator Alli has “lived governance.”
That is precisely the problem.
If he has lived governance for decades, why does his manifesto struggle to produce a single transformative idea that the people of Oyo State have not heard before?
More roads.
More teachers.
More hospitals.
More healthcare centres.
More welfare programmes.
More government spending.
These are not revolutionary ideas. They are standard promises found in virtually every gubernatorial manifesto in Nigeria.
Indeed, many of them are already being implemented by the administration that SSACO describes as a failure.
Therein lies the contradiction.
The organisation insists that Oyo’s healthcare system has failed, yet its proposed remedy is a Primary Healthcare Centre in every ward, a policy direction already being pursued by the current administration.
It condemns the government’s developmental philosophy while borrowing heavily from it.
It attacks the government’s record while marketing many of the government’s priorities.
And then it expects the public not to notice.
The people of Oyo State are politically sophisticated enough to ask a simple question: If Governor Seyi Makinde’s government is a failure, why does the APC manifesto look so much like its roadmap?
The truth is that SSACO’s argument collapses under the weight of its own admissions.
It acknowledges challenges in healthcare, education and local government administration, as every government in Nigeria faces.
What it does not explain, however, is why the people of a state recently ranked Nigeria’s most liveable by Phillips Consulting and rated the country’s most democratic in the 2025 Democracy Performance Index released by Kimpact Development Initiative and published by StatiSense should replace an administration delivering measurable outcomes with a manifesto that largely mirrors the same policy ideas.
That is the debate SSACO keeps avoiding.
Not whether Senator Alli has held offices.
Not whether there are challenges in governance.
Not whether improvements can still be made.
The debate is whether the APC has presented a genuinely superior and original alternative.
Days after unveiling Oyo AHEAD, the answer remains elusive.
Credentials are not a vision.
Statistics are not a strategy.
And experience, however extensive, does not automatically translate into innovation.
LThe people of Oyo State deserve more than recycled promises packaged as change. They deserve a compelling reason to abandon a trajectory that has earned national recognition for liveability and democratic governance.
So far, SSACO has given them none.
And until it identifies a bold, original idea capable of transforming Oyo beyond its current accomplishments, the question will remain: If the present is such a failure, why does the future proposed by Senator Alli look so much like it?
It is for this reason that the people of Oyo State remain convinced that Honourable Bimbo Adekanmbi of the Allied Peoples’ Movement (APM) represents the most credible path for sustaining progress, deepening good governance and building on the achievements already recorded in the state.
