News

OPINION: The Ɠhomid In The Tears Of JAMB

Published

1 month ago

May 20, 2025

By Suyi Ayodele

“Dear Ajanlekoko Oriojobi Samuel (real name withheld), Reg Number: 2125512372451F. 2025 UTME Result: Underaged and Under-Performed.”

With the above terse message from the Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB), the fates of thousands of Nigerians who sat for the 2025 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) were sealed.

Those thousands of candidates will never see their results. Their parents or guardians, who paid the registration fees and took the candidates—children in their teens—to the various examination centres, will never know the performances of their children’s or wards.

Incidentally, those candidates did not commit any examination malpractice. They were not guilty of any crime known or unknown. Their crime was to be children of the Nigerian society that looks backwards, where other climes are forward marching!

The only crime those affected “underaged’ candidates committed was to be endowed with brains that the awkward system we run here frowns at. Their counterparts in other sane countries of the world are celebrated. But here, we are still in the Stone Age to accept that there are geniuses!

So, when Professor Is-haq Oloyede, the JAMB Registrar, came crying over the mass failure recorded for over 400,000 candidates who wrote this year’s UTME because of the glitch which affected JAMB servers, Nigerians must know that there were more issues than the computer malfunctioning Oloyede cried about. The tears of the former Vice Chancellor of the University of Ilorin were nothing but Ekún Egbére.

When two rival wives fight and one cries when the matter comes up for adjudication, my Yoruba elders have a way to qualify that. They devise a saying: Arojó sunkún obìrin, ilé níi tú (A woman who cries while stating her case tends to destroy the home) to explain the intention of such an act. The tears by the woman playing the victim are considered manipulative.

Elders who sit in judgment don’t usually pay attention to the crying woman in any dispute. They could see through her deceptive tears and her true intention — simply to gain undue sympathy. In my culture, a woman is allowed to cry as much as she wants and then asked to restate her case. More often than not, the crying woman turns out to be the guilty party.

There is a more graphic and semiotic way to qualify such crocodile tears. The Yoruba concept of “Ekún Egbére” is the apt way to describe manipulative tears by the one trying to play the victim.

Ekún Egbére means the tears of the goblin (or bush baby). Egbére in Yoruba mythology refers to a short spiritual being who goes about with a small mat, crying. The myth around the goblin, Egbére, says it cries out, looking for sympathy for its unusually small stature among the legion of ghomids created by Obatala.

It tells whoever cares to listen that the creator is unfair to it by making it the smallest of the ghomids, whereas it has more potential than any others ever created. Those other ghomids Egbére accuses of conspiracy against it. It says they conspired to dampen its potential and good work! How true?

What Egbére, however, does not tell its listeners and would-be sympathisers is the fact that its small stature has nothing to do with any heavenly factory faults. The fault is due to the goblin’s own making of rubbing the wrong lotion on its own body while it had just come out of Obatala’s furnace without waiting for the god of creativity to apply the normal lotion.

Egbére, the legend states, mistakes the white lotion (efun idagba) for the one that would give it a giant stature. But by design, it is the black lotion from the palm kernel that makes all Obatala’s creatures big and tall. Egbére defies all entreaties to wait, be patient and allow the day to break before setting out for the pot of lotion.

It realised too late that it had touched the wrong pot and applied the wrong lotion. Its growth becomes stunted such that its hands could not reach the shelves where Obatala keeps his treasures. The only thing within the reach of the Lilliput is the small mat that Egbére carries about as its permanent burden. The mat, though believed to be a harbinger of fortune, no one in history has been recorded to have become wealthy as a result of taking possession of it.

So, Egbére goes about crying, giving a false narrative to gain the people’s sympathy as the victim of Obatala’s creative abnormality! It does that without stating how it goes against the general principle of discretion and the heavenly discipline of patience and respect for public opinion.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Ganduje And China’s Execution Noose

As it is with Egbére, the crying spirit, so is it with Professor Oloyede, the Registrar of JAMB, whose conduct of the last UTME leaves the nation gasping for breath at the rate of mass failure recorded in the five states of the South-East geopolitical zone and Lagos, the Centre of Excellence!

Expectedly, heaven has been let loose on Oloyede, especially from our fellow Nigerians from the East. The noise from that region over what many considered to be a deliberate attempt to deny candidates of Igbo extraction admission into our universities, is enough to sink this federation. Most unfortunate is that the intelligentsia from the South-East joined the fray of ethnic profiling of the computer errors that occurred!

As much as I find most of the comments from the South-East over the JAMB glitch case alarming, I think the reaction speaks more to some fundamental issues about our nationhood. It is most unfortunate that 65 years after independence and an avoidable civil war where we lost over two million patriots, Nigeria is still as divided as the period we were struggling for independence. Most saddening is that no administration after the 1967-1970 civil war has brought to the fore our differences more than the current government, which began in 2015 with the administration of General Muhammadu Buhari!

It is, therefore, natural for the South-East to easily conclude that the recent JAMB misfortune was targeted at the region. The bitter argument here, which many of us are not ready to accept, is that the Igbo race has not been treated fairly by the Nigerian nation. The only unfortunate argument by the Igbo is to think that the Yoruba are their sole enemy!

And I say this without any apology, until the Ndigbo consciously realise that they suffer the same fate as other ethnic groups, they will remain largely marginalised. Until they shed the toga of Yoruba-hate-us and adopt the holistic idea that most ethnic groups in Nigeria have one thing or the other against the Ndigbo, nothing will change for them.

Should that be the case too, the Ndigbo must also look inward and ask self-directed questions as to why the race is detested by virtually all other ethnic nationalities. They must do self-retrospection to determine what in the attitude of an average Igbo man would make others dislike him.

While doing that, the Nigerian nation must also take deliberate steps to integrate the Ndigbo into our nationhood. The attitude of ‘no-Igbo-man-can-be-president’ doesn’t augur well for our unity. If the Ndigbo are not good enough to lead Nigeria, can we deliberately allow them to own their own space, their nation, where they will have no one to contend with?

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: The Ibàs Of Rivers State

This is why it is difficult to rationalise that the glitch which affected JAMB servers affected all five states in the South-East and Lagos! For people who already feel unwanted, it will be difficult for anyone to convince them to look at the issue from the angle of science and technology.

I want to put my shirt on it that if the errors had occurred only in the South-West states, no matter the sophistication of the people there, there would have been no outcry of ethnic attack on the prospects of the candidates from that region. That is due to the pseudo-federalism we practice. The North-East, North-West, North-Central and South-South would have felt the same way. The only difference, probably, would have been the magnitude of the outcry.

While JAMB has our sympathy for the unfortunate incident, I think there are some other fundamental issues we need to address here. I strongly believe that whatever happened in JAMB or with JAMB or to JAMB can be traced to just one problem: restructuring deficiency!

A lot of Nigerians have said that it is wrong to have just one body conducting examinations for both federal, state and private universities in a country that claims to run federalism! The recent claims by JAMB that it remitted over N6 billion to the coffers of the Federal Government makes the body more of a profit-making venture than a serious examination set up.

If we celebrate JAMB for making enough profit like a business venture, for the Federal Government, what about the state-funded universities? What part of that ‘profit’ goes to the private universities? Should JAMB be talking about how much money it rakes in or how effective it is in the conduct of the examinations it was established to conduct?

Take the case of the “underaged” candidates we mentioned above. Why would JAMB withhold the results of candidates it termed “underaged” after collecting the registration fee from them? Where is that done, except in a country where roguery is the order of the day?

If the National Assembly had been alive to its responsibilities, would JAMB have had the audacity to withhold candidates’ results based on being “underaged” without any act of parliament allowing that? If a candidate purchased a form, submitted the form, was accredited and allowed to write an exam, why would the examination body send the message: “UTME Result: Underaged and Under-Performed” without showing the actual scores of the candidates?

Oloyede is a brilliant scholar, no doubt. He did well, so they say, when he was the VC of the University of Ilorin. But I find it difficult to believe that it did not occur to the erudite professor that some parents actually asked their children to write the examination as a mock exercise to prepare those children for when they will be of age, according to the backwards-thinking policy of age limit for admission into our universities?

So, if Oloyede comes shedding Ekún Egbére on national television because he wanted our sympathy, we should, while giving him handkerchief to clean his crocodile tears, tell him that he is presiding over a rotten institution that bears no relevance to modern-day progressive ideas of a nation that desires development.

Agreed cyber-attack or glitch is not peculiar to Nigeria. Our major concern is how, when it happened to us, it wore a three-piece suit of ethnic colouration and age discrimination! That is the peculiarity of the Nigerian version of the global phenomenon. In Nigeria, what affects other nations comes in different shapes, shades and dimensions for us. Nigeria must always “happen” to any universal issue that finds its way to our shores!

So, Oloyede can ‘cry me a river’. It will not vitiate the fact that the institution he supervises is both deaf, dumb and backwards thinking in a global society that makes progress. JAMB, we all can recall, subjected children to uncommon trauma when it allowed them to be on the road to the examination centres as early as 5.00 am! Whatever happened to the server is just a continuation of that trauma.

We shall all see the outcome when the results of the resit examinations are out. We don’t need any professor of child psychology or education planning, and measurement to tell us that those candidates would not be at their optimal best while resitting the examinations.

If truly we want a restructured country with full-fledged federalism, JAMB has no business conducting examinations, for instance, for Ekiti State University or Afe Babalola University. It has no business determining the questions Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, or Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, should set for its intended undergraduates. What do we even gain from the centralised examination when a candidate with a grade of 250 marks from any of the South-West states will be denied admission to study Medicine, and his counterpart from Zamfara State who scored 180 marks will be given a laboratory coat as a medical student?

Nigeria must begin to address its numerous imbalances. This present administration, run by those whose slogans while in the trenches as opposition leaders, were restructuring and true federalism, should walk the talk and live like men of honour. JAMB is a deep example of a unitary system in federalism! It makes a mockery of all of us.

The lawlessness of JAMB at fixing the age limit for its examination against a subsisting judgment of a competent jurisdiction apes the lawlessness of the government of the day. Nigeria, no doubt, needs an effective and efficient examination body. What the nation does not need now is a weeping Chief Executive of its examination body. Ekún Egbére won’t solve our self-inflicted problem; proper restructuring will do. Maybe we should just start with JAMB.

News

How Atiku, El-Rufai, Amaechi Can Learn From Tinubu’s School Of Politics

Published

7 hours ago

June 22, 2025

Editor

By Festus Adedayo

Power politics in the animal kingdom could be as intense, deceptive and selfish as it is in the human kingdom. An ancient African allegory whose patent cannot be credited to a particular tradition illustrates this. It is the fable of an old forest warhorse, the lion. After years of feasting on animals, his mane soaked in their innocent blood, Old Lion became too senescent to hunt for games. Stricken with old age, diverse infirmities and unable to put food on his own table, the King decided to get food by subterfuge and trickery.

Always by himself and soaked in myriad thoughts and stratagems for many nights and days, one day a thought sidled into his mind. He would pretend to be so infirm that he could not hunt and thus court ‘get well’ visits of other animals. He then got emissaries to broadcast his infirmity round and about the forest. As the message got to them, the animals debated the prospect of visiting him after the debilitating havoc he had wrecked on their peers and forebears. The majority of opinions supported paying the king of the jungle get-well-quick visits.

Thus, one after the other, animals of various kinds paid the King visits in his supposed infirmary. As each sauntered in, the King made barbecue of their fleshes. However, Tortoise, the wily Trickster animal, according to the Yoruba version of that fable, burst the King’s bubble. Some other African climes’ account say it was not Tortoise but the Red Fox. So, the animal came to the conclusion that, though he would satisfy the majority’s decision to pay the King obeisance, he would be a whiff careful and wiser.

So Fox/Tortoise devised a trick. He presented himself at a respectable distance from a cave by the hill that led to the King’s lair. From there, he shouted at the top of his voice to the aged King Lion to announce his presence. On hearing his voice, the King peered out queasily and bade him come into the lair. Like an Apiroro, one who feigns sleep, who must be atop the mastery of the theatrics of their game, the Lion dragged his response with great effort and said, “I am not so well… But, my friend, why do you stand without? Pray, come in and wish me well.” The Fox/Tortoise, in a sarcasm that mocked the Lion’s theatrics said: “No, thank you, Your Majesty. But, I noticed that there are many prints of feet entering your cave, but I see no trace of any returning.”

Last Friday, ex-Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Nasir El-Rufai, Rotimi Amaechi and their co-travelers inside the Nigerian National Coalition Group (NNCG) coach arrived at a significant juncture in their bid to send President Bola Tinubu back to Lagos in 2027. On that day, the NNCG formally applied to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for registration as the All Democratic Alliance (ADA) party.

As far as formality goes, the dramatis personae on this journey have many reasons to clink champagne glasses. In semiotic representation, which is the study of signs, symbols, their use and representation, ADA would seem to be the greatest weapon in the NNCG’s hands to skewer the heart of the Broom, symbol of the reigning All Progressives Congress (APC).

Like the old wily Lion, virtually all the political characters on the two aisles of the divide – opposition and in government – suffer similar fates in the estimation of Nigerians today. In relationship calculus, Yoruba advise a younger one burying the elder in the presence of the younger sibling to be mindful of the depth of the grave they dig because same fate awaits them. At the joint sitting of the National Assembly on Democracy Day, Tinubu literally gloated about the walnut-pod-seeds schism and discord that characterize Nigeria’s opposition parties. “It is, indeed, a pleasure to witness you in such disarray,” he said.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: OPINION: Tinubu, Sanwo-Olu And The Fish God

A few days later, the demon came out of its seclusion. The deodorant the APC had been spraying over its messy internal power struggles expired and the putrid smell hit the nose with the bang of an Iraqi missile. The party’s Northeast leaders’ meeting for the adoption of Tinubu for a second term exposed vultures gathering round the APC in an ominous exclusion plan against Kashim Shettima. The game is to spike Shettima’s name from the 2027 presidential ballot.

Today, APC’s power apparatchik is running helter-skelter. The task is to paper over a grisly crack, an implosion tornado that may erupt in the Shettima exclusion gambit. It is a throwback into a historic Tinubu total power holding tendency, a total frown at and intolerance for sharing power with anyone. As Lagos governor, Tinubu dispensed with deputies as a junky changes syringes.

All of a sudden, erstwhile good governance poster-boy, Borno State governor, Babagana Zulum, a Shettima boy, has become the proverbial Elúùlù, a Yoruba-named brown-feathered Wood Dove bird whose cry is reputed to possess the mystical power of drawing rains from the heavens. The belief is that Elúùlù’s rain could cause everyone to scamper out for alternative shield. As Zulum chirps like Elúùlù, either on the insecure security in his state, against the Tinubu government’s dissonant narrative of peace in Borno, or even over other matters, power watchers see an internal power disruption in the APC.

Zulum’s Elúùlù may be foreshadowing a bitter rain that will pour in the APC over Shettima’s exclusion from a second term. This cry may also be a reminder of a Kowée, another mystic bird which Yoruba mythological belief says whenever it chirps, a lurking danger of death is imminent.

The Shettima travails may point to a saying that the whiplash used to trounce the older wife is kept for the younger one on the rafter. It was this same Shettima who, on a Channels Television interview, mocked the totalitarian system of Nigerian presidency which sidelined Yemi Osinbajo under Muhammadu Buhari. Shettima had said, “Osinbajo is a good man; he’s a nice man. But nice men do not make good leaders, because nice men tend to be nasty. Nice men should be selling popcorn, ice cream.” Today, Shettima sells a medley of ice cream and popcorn under a nasty and grim presidential power play.

Then, there is intense hunger and anger in the land which government is obviously too lame to tame. Statistics have become ballistics which the Tinubu government’s mind-doctor evangelists bombard Nigerians with. The latest ballistic is that inflation figure has decreased. Yet, the spinners of these figures are unable to explain the fit of sulks Nigerians relapse into when they confront skyrocketing foods and goods in the market. Neither is anyone responding to the people’s groan at their ebbing purchasing power which the twin policies of subsidy withdrawal and Naira flotation have birthed. It is obvious that, as Nigerians walk into the electioneering years, government will have no balm to apply on the people’s aches.

Then, there is the gale of insecurity in the country. Unbeknown to Nigerians, the Tandi of the Buhari government which they thought was dance-shy, cannot even stand the TandiTandi of the Tinubu government which does not have a waist to wag to any danceable tune. Northeast terrorists dance to celebratory songs as they hijack Nigerian local governments as their spoils of war. Same terrorists drink palm-wine with dead Nigerians’ skulls as gourds. In the Northwest, bandits kill Nigerians en-masse as you trample on cockroaches. Benue and Plateau States are poster-boys of government’s helplessness in the face of superior herders’ brains, weapons and strategies. Nigerians in those states bury their dead in silence as federal government regurgitates obituaries, condolence messages as press releases which mask its cowardice. The recent Benue massacre is an example.

So many other missteps of the last two years line the dais. They are missteps which an opposition group or party could weaponize to win Nigerians’ hearts. Is it the Gilbert Chagoury-lization of the Nigerian economy? Or the lack of openness and accountability in the Lagos-Calabar 700km N15trillion road project which the president awarded to a man he openly admitted was his ally? Is it the Airbus A330 presidential aircraft which cost Nigeria $100million and which never passed the senate lens? Is it the flying rumour of mind-boggling corruption that has stuck to this government like a leech in two years? You do not have to scrape more than the surface to amass a shovelful.

To rehash what wily Trickster Tortoise told Lion, King of the jungle, those putting together the ADA as Nigeria’s opposition party also have Tinubu-type logs in their eyes. Nigerians see them as people who have “many prints of feet entering your cave, but (see) no trace of any returning”.

Tinubu was right by claiming, as he did in Kaduna last week, that Uba Sani had transformed the State from a “toxic, uncontrollable environment”.

Under El-Rufai, Kaduna was a horror scene. Though ranked comparatively higher than any other state in Nigeria by multilateral agencies on the scorecard of good governance and accountability, in eight years, El-Rufai’s Kaduna was a state of weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. The peace in Southern Kaduna today is a departure from the toxicity of the El-Rufai era. When you now have the same character seeking to play leading role in bringing a let to the suffering of the people of Nigeria, it speaks volumes of the kind of leadership Nigerians should look forward to.

MORE FROM THE AUTHOR: Olunloyo: Goodnight, Voltaire

Then, Atiku Abubakar. The ex-VP’s politics is undoubtedly woven round self. Since 1993, he has been a presidential candidate and has failed on each occasion. It is obvious that the current ADA is again primed round him. When self is the issue as in this manner, Yoruba ask if the individual’s esophagus is the sole route to Oyo (Onàofu ntienikanniwonn’gbalos’Oyóní?)

Amaechi is not any better. Having lost out in the power equation of the post-Tinubu era, this former Transport Minister has become an emergency critic, even being ludicrous enough to claim he is hungry. The trio and their co-travelers are united by anger and lust for power, rather than any meaningful attempt to rescue Nigeria from the vice grip of Tinubu. ADA is a huge log that has stayed afloat on and fed on the ecosystem of the murky and filthy river of Fourth Republic Nigerian politics for too long. It has stayed so long on the river that it is mistaking itself for an amphibian animal. And Yoruba say, no matter how long a log stays in the river, it will never become a crocodile.

Borrowing from Lasisi Olagunju, ADA and its minders are like mourners at their own funeral. They can never be a soothing counterpoise to the rot of the Tinubu government. Were it to be possible, the Ibrahim Babangida newbreed model would have been a perfect reply to this current order where, head or tail, Nigerians may lose.

The ADA crew, especially Atiku Abubakar, would need to learn some basic lessons that Tinubu taught Nigerian politics. Between 2007 when he left Lagos governorship and 2023 when he became president, Tinubu wore the strategic patience garment of the vulture. He waited patiently within this period, biding his time for Aso Rock. He could have put himself forth to be Nigeria’s president in 2015 but strategically supported Buhari.

Conversely, at every election season, Atiku’s face thoughtlessly adorns presidential campaign posters like a boring epigram. It is obvious that he and his ADA are too mired in the problems and challenges of Nigeria to be a solution to them. Amaechi and El-Rufai are obviously in ADA out of anger and hungry for revenge against those who chucked them out of their birthright of being in government in perpetuity.

The little I know about anger is, when you are consumed by it, you wake up lost, and you will lose sight of everything. Including your sense.

News

Diri Approves Automatic Employment For UAT First Class Graduates

Published

21 hours ago

June 21, 2025

Editor

Governor of Bayelsa State, Senator Douye Diri, has offered automatic employment to First Class degree graduates of the University of Africa, Toru-Orua (UAT), in Sagbama Local Government Area of the state.

In a statement, the Chief Press Secretary to governor, Daniel Alabrah, said Diri made the announcement on Saturday at the maiden combined convocation ceremony of 2020/2021, 2021/2022, 2022/2023 and 2024 academic sessions of the university.

Diri said the gesture was part of measures to check the brain drain syndrome.

The governor said the gesture had been replicated in other state-owned tertiary institutions such as the Niger Delta University, Amassoma, in line with his administration’s policy to prioritise education and boost human capital development.

Congratulating the graduands, the governor praised his predecessor, Senator Seriake Dickson representing Bayelsa West, for his vision and political will in establishing the UAT, which he noted was meeting the educational needs of the state and beyond.

“ln line with our government’s policy, all First Class graduates of UAT will be offered automatic employment to ensure that we do not lose our best brains.

“This first combined convocation ceremony of UAT is momentous and historical. When l took over as governor, l had a lot of presentations, which included closing down the UAT. But l came to the inescapable conclusion that rather than shutting it down, l opted to establish more because education remains our number one priority.”

As Visitor to the UAT, Diri announced the appointment and investiture of Dr. Nwachukwu Nnam Obi III, Ogba of Ogbaland in Rivers State, as the institution’s Chancellor.

Responding to the challenges presented by the Vice Chancellor, Diri said government will continue to address them through collaborative efforts and urged the institution to explore funding modules towards generating income.

While assuring that the auditorium and Senate building projects would be completed before the end of his tenure, the state’s chief executive promised that government would also address the problem of staff accommodation and that transport vehicles will be provided to ease the challenges faced by workers and students at UAT, NDU and the Federal University, Otuoke.

On the institution’s power needs, Diri said when the 60mw independent power plant procured by the government becomes functional, it would cover the university’s location.

In his remarks, the Vice Chancellor, Prof. Solomon Ebobrah, announced that 66 were awarded first class degrees out of the 905 graduands of the four academic sessions.

He expressed appreciation to the Diri administration for its increased monthly subvention to the UAT and listed a number of challenges to include uncompleted auditorium and Senate buildings, lack of perimeter fencing, power supply, staff accommodation, lecture theatres, teaching and non-teaching staff office accommodation among others.

In his remarks, the Pro Chancellor and Chairman, Governing Council, Barr. Kemela Okara, equally expressed gratitude to government for its support towards the successful accreditation of all programmes by the National Universities Commission.

News

Aiyedatiwa Proposes Death Penalty For Kidnappers

Published

22 hours ago

June 21, 2025

Editor

In a bid to eradicate kidnapping in the state, the Ondo State Government has proposed a death sentence for whoever is found guilty of kidnapping in the state.

The Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice in the state, Dr Olukayode Ajulo, SAN, disclosed this while speaking with journalists on Saturday after the weekly state executive council meeting.

It was gathered that the state governor, Mr Lucky Aiyedatiwa presided over the meeting.

Ajulo said the proposal would soon be transmitted to the state House of Assembly for necessary legislative action.

He said, ”Kidnapping and cultism have become major threats to safety and public order and strengthening relevant legal frameworks would help deter such crimes and improve the overall security landscape.

”The proposals would soon be transmitted to the House of Assembly for necessary legislative action, including sentencing convicted kidnappers to death.”

Also speaking, the Special Adviser to the Governor on Infrastructure, Lands and Housing, Engr. Abiola Olawoye, revealed that the Executive Council approved the construction of two major dual-carriageway road projects in the state.

According to him, the first is the construction of a 24.75-kilometre dual carriageway from Ugbeyin Junction – Okitipupa Market – OAUSTECH – Ugbonla Junction – Igbokoda Jetty.

“The road will feature a 9.3-metre wide carriageway on both sides, a 1.2-metre median, concrete line drains, walkways, asphaltic shoulders in undeveloped areas, a 3-metre utility area, and solar-powered streetlights along the median. The entire road corridor is 28 metres wide, with a total right of way of 40 metres. It will also include modern traffic lights at critical intersections and is designed to carry heavy traffic with a reinforced pavement structure.

”The second project is the construction of a 6.7-kilometre dual carriageway from Supare Junction – Akungba – Ikare Road in Akoko area of the state. The specifications are similar, including a 9.3-metre carriageway on either side, 1.2-metre median, reinforced concrete line drains, walkways, a 3-metre utility area, solar-powered streetlights, and traffic management systems. It is also built to withstand heavy vehicular movement.

“In addition to these, the council approved the provision and installation of 6,000 standalone solar streetlights across the three senatorial districts—2,000 each for Ondo North, Ondo Central, and Ondo South. This is part of the state’s agenda to improve safety and public lighting infrastructure.”