COMPANY OR PARTY? HOW SEYI MAKINDE ALLEGEDLY BETRAYED OYO PDP FOUNDING FATHERS

By Seyifunmi Odunuga 

​The political warfare within the Oyo State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has reached a boiling point following allegations that Governor Seyi Makinde has systematically abandoned the party structure that built his political career.

 Speaking out on Splash FM’s political program Insight, the State Youth Leader of the Oyo PDP, Honorable Adeleke Akeem launched a blistering attack on the governor, claiming that Makinde has stopped running a political party and has instead chosen to manage it like a private corporate enterprise.

​According to the party’s youth leadership, the current crisis is a direct result of deep-seated betrayal. Tracing the roots of the fallout back to 2019, Adeleke detailed how a powerful coalition of the state's founding PDP fathers—including elder statesmen like Alhaji Hazeem Gbolarumi, Senator Ayo Adeseun, and Mulikat Akande—painstakingly worked to unite fierce rival factions from the historic "Watershed" and "Baptist" congresses. This foundational machinery spent its own resources and political capital to hand Makinde the governorship on a unified platter.

​However, once firmly established in power, the governor allegedly treated the party as a "company" where founding shareholders were aggressively diluted and frozen out. Adeleke alleged that Makinde single-handedly shattered long-standing zoning agreements across Oyo’s five geopolitical zones, entirely bypassing the party's leadership to make unilateral decisions regarding key administrative cabinet members, commissioners, and special advisers.

​"The real PDP members who funded and built this party from scratch have been left to suffer in the cold, while total outsiders sit at the table enjoying the benefits of our hard work," Adeleke lamented, emphasizing that a political party belongs to its members, not an individual chief executive.

​In a dramatic disclosure of just how fractured the relationship became, Adeleke recounted an incident from a past party congress at the Lekan Salami Stadium in Adamasingba. He claimed that an embattled Governor Makinde publicly fell to his knees before Alhaji Hazim Gbolarumi, grabbing the elder statesman’s leg and pleading for cooperation while promising to listen to the party structure moving forward. But the corporate style of governance allegedly resumed shortly after the election. Despite a subsequent peace visit to Gbolarumi's residence where Makinde swore to fairly distribute local government roles, the youth leader revealed that the governor completely ghosted the party elders, utilizing his personal assistants to dodge scheduled follow-up meetings.

​The final corporate takeover, according to the party, came when Makinde shifted his political weight to the Allied Peoples Movement (APM) to anchor a presidential bid. Adeleke declared that Makinde has officially checked out of the PDP, dismissing any talk of a PDP-APM alliance as a public relations scam. He noted that a politician cannot stand in two places at once, and because the governor treats the state party assets as personal real estate, the mainstream PDP has been locked out of its own state headquarters. The governor reportedly stripped the iconic PDP insignia from the building, replacing it entirely with APM branding.

​Rather than folding, the betrayed founding fathers have officially reclaimed the party's machinery, drawing a distinct line between Makinde's corporate entity and the actual political party.

 Operating from a newly leased alternative headquarters in Molete—secured through agreements with party titans Baba Yekin Adeojo and Chief Yinka Taiwo—the mainstream Oyo PDP has announced its intentions to back former deputy governor Barrister Alhaji Hazim Gbolarumi for the 2027 gubernatorial ticket.

 The move signals an aggressive push by the original party creators to wrest control of the state back from what they describe as a corporate hijack.