A Hundred Days of Gloss: Cosmetologist Aiyedatiwa and the Gospel According to Glamour
An opinion By: Wándé T. Àjàyí (Ondo State PDP Chieftain)
One hundred days. A hundred photo ops. A hundred press statements. A hundred ribbon cutting of projects that exists only in the dusty recesses of a budget document. In a country where style trumps substance, Govenor Aiyedatiwa has emerged not as just a student of this gospel, but as its high priest. He came, he posed, he pontificated. But has he governed?
Aiyedatiwa’s hundred days is a perfect study in how to spend the people’s money on nothing and then ask them to clap. We are witnessing a government that has mastered the art of commissioning new contracts while abandoning inherited ones, a government that forgets that progress is not in how sharp the picture is but in the picture.
Take a trip down the Ore-Okitipupa death trap of a road. Ask the people of Ese-Akoko to point to State Government presence in their town. Ask the contractors who has packed their equipment and fled due to non-payment, even after Ilaje Pocolee’s signature. But don’t you dare ask the government. They are too busy sharing fresh contracts with figures bloated enough to float the Titanic.
And then there’s the infamous health recruitment debacle. Thousands of hopefuls lured with the promise of gainful employment, made to pay for forms, attend screenings, sit for tests, and now they sit at home, jobless, mocked by the silence of a government that cashed the application fees but forgot to create the jobs. In other climes, this would be called a scam. In Aiyedatiwa’s Ondo, it is called policy.
Yet, amid this spectacular inertia, the allocation flows. Month after month, Ondo State takes home one of the fattest federal cheques in the South West, but it ends up as an invisible investment. Where does it go? We see no new schools. We see no industrial zones. We see no roads. But we see SUVs. We see billboards. We see branded Ankara. We see the gospel of glam at work.
Most damning of all is the governor’s willful blindness to the South of Ondo, the very region that oils the state’s economic engine. Ilaje, Ese-Odo, and Ijaw communities, blessed with oil, gas, bitumen, and a blue economy begging for action, continue to wallow in abandonment.
Sea incursion has devoured the lands of Ayetoro, yet not a kobo of serious intervention has sailed their way. The riverine belt cries for a seaport, for marine economy infrastructure, for roads not swallowed by mangroves. But the governor, a son of the soil, governs as if allergic to saltwater.
And now, on this centenary of ceremonial governance, the drums are beating. The praise-singers have taken over the airwaves. They call him “performer-in-chief.”
They say he has stabilized the state. What they mean is that he has stabilized stagnation. That he has governed with the calm of someone perfectly at peace with underperformance. The tragedy is not just the lies. It is that they are told so confidently.
But history is not written in hashtags. It is carved in concrete. And when the lights of propaganda fade, when the rented crowds go home, and when the records are opened, the truth will out. Aiyedatiwa’s first hundred days have shown us not the promise of a new dawn, but the recycling of old deceptions.
No vision. No legacy. Just confetti without a celebration. A government at ease with appearance. A state sinking beneath the weight of cosmetic governance. Lucky indeed.
