Birthday Tribute: Ibarapakan’s SA Media, Hassan Olaoniye, Celebrates Principal, Shares Heartfelt Story of Friend’s NASS Ordeal

Closed Doors to Open Arms: Ibarapakan’s Transformative Leadership Inspires Hope

Today marks a special day—the birthday of Hon. (Dr.) Anthony Adebayo Adepoju, a thoroughbred public servant, a man who has proven that being in an exalted leadership position is not an opportunity for accumulation of wealth but a call to serve God and humanity. I have had the opportunity to acquire proficient leadership skills working with Hon. (Dr.) Adepoju in the last eighteen months. These experiences include the ones that I am leaving no stone unturned to encapsulate. Thank you for the opportunity to serve and learn under your representation.

Hon. Adepoju is a career devotee and work aficionado. I have always tried in vain to get the right word to describe his granite-like sternness towards workplace ethics that any faint-hearted individual will find rather a culture shock. He is rigorous, unyielding, uncompromising and extremely dedicated to his profession.

At work, Ibarapakan gives no room for laxity or complacency to the extent that if you are not competent, you may not have the courage to work with him, but he is also a good teacher and a strong believer in a third chance, not even a second chance that everyone is used to. As a technocrat, he puts round pegs in round holes but wouldn’t interfere in your job role. You don’t need to be told to know that Hon. Adepoju is a serious public servant; he resumes to his office before 9:00 am every day and closes the office around after 9:00 pm. Our office in the National Assembly of Nigeria has been named the office of the people who resume duty early and still close late in the night. Even after the closing hour that he is expected to go home and retire to bed, Ibarapakan engages in intensive lobbying on the streets of Abuja by visiting different individuals just to share a piece of good news with his constituents.

He has, on many occasions, demonstrated in action before his members of staff the real reasons to bury the idea of vying for the seat he currently occupies. The stress that comes with the exalted position is seriously not worth it, but it seems Ibarapakan makes it look like that simply because of his passion to serve his people meritoriously. I advise him to always be in constant touch with his doctor to know if the stress is not too much for his health; thank God he prioritises that.

Even during recess, when everyone is expected to have some family time, my principal will say, “This is the time for real legislative work; our office must not be shut. What if we have constituents around who are in urgent need of our assistance? We are here for them and we must always be in their service.” Hon. Adepoju has spent nineteen months in office, and I have been working with him for eighteen months. Aside from weekends, I have never seen any week where our office is shut between Monday and Friday.

If the above had been the approach to governance before Ibarapakan’s emergence, maybe my childhood friend would have started finding her feet at the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) at the moment. The beautiful but sad experience started some years back when she picked strong interest in doing her one-year mandatory service, otherwise known as National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), in Abuja, the nation’s capital. As we all know, life is not easy for a child of nobody in this part of the world, but the only problem with us is that we believe we can always achieve anything, and that is why we don’t leave our life to luck.

So after a successful relocation to Abuja from Rivers State, where she was initially posted, she wasted no time stating where she preferred to serve as her place of primary assignment (PPA); it was at NDIC. We both laughed about it but had the strong belief that anything is possible. She had been told by some of her colleagues at the community development service (CDS) that she should let go of her ambition simply because she would need the assistance of a serving minister, senator, or House of Representatives member to give her a recommendation to serve at such an institution.

We said to ourselves, “We don’t have a minister from our region; we have a senator being shared by nine local government areas.” The feasibility of getting a recommendation from either a minister or senator is not certain; we concluded that since we are in Abuja, accessing the office of the lawmaker representing our federal constituency should not be a Herculean task. Since she is a corper, she can always navigate her way with her identity card to access the National Assembly of Nigeria while I continued to brainstorm on who is to call to be of help. Each time my friend went to the National Assembly, having passed through different stages of questioning from a retinue of security personnel at the Assembly, she would come back to share sad stories that the office of our lawmaker is always closed, and on a few occasions when the office is open, the people in the office showed strong unwillingness to attend to her.

She used to come back home with sadness and frustration until she considered going to other lawmakers’ offices if they could be of help. The stress would later become easy through some people she met at the National Assembly that since she could not see the lawmaker representing her constituency, she should ask for the Chairman of the House Committee on Insurance at the time. On getting to the National Assembly again after about 20 attempts, she was able to find the committee chairman, an honourable lawmaker from the Southeast, who honourably gave her a recommendation letter having been briefed about her struggle.

She loved the system at NDIC; no sooner had she started serving at the institution than she was strongly advised by permanent members of staff of the institution to start her journey of being retained at the institution. It’s her strong desire to be retained ab initio without being advised. She was told she needed a recommendation from either a minister, senator, or a House of Representative member. She began another journey of seeing the lawmaker representing her; at that time, she was no longer in the good book of the committee chairman, who earlier gave her a recommendation letter to serve at NDIC for some reasons I would not like to disclose. Other reasons include the refusal of the lawmaker representing her to call to appreciate him for what he did for her constituent—the same lawmaker she never met!

She kept visiting the office of the lawmaker representing our constituency at the time, but all to no avail until the completion of her NYSC, where her hope of being retained was dashed away, but in all of these, special thanks to the honourable lawmaker representing Ibarapa East/Ido federal constituency at the time, he tried his best despite not being his constituent. I have tried to be silent about the year this event took place just to avoid unnecessary political correctness from some political followers who are yet to see life beyond the border of their nose, but it is a story that some individuals are aware of.

And that brings me to how Hon. Adepoju has made the same office accessible to all and sundry. Governance is truly not rocket science.

I was able to share the sad story of my friend because everything happened right before me. What about those that I didn’t know who had similar experiences? Development doesn’t come overnight; most times we bring misfortune to ourselves by the kind of people we follow or support, especially in leadership positions, and sometimes it might not also be the fault of the leader you have elected but the quality of the team such a leader selects to work with him, but the bulk of the blame must also be on him. The quality of a leader is determined by his team.

Today, you don’t need to go to the moon to see the lawmaker representing you, be it at the constituency level or in Abuja; to learn that the possibility of achieving this is 100% without prior appointment makes it unprecedented in the history of representation in our beloved constituency. As I said a fortnight ago, may God spare our lives. In 2027, it is left for the people of the constituency to choose the path they want to follow.

I am sure they will never try to go back to Egypt, where they can only get to see the building of the National Assembly of Nigeria on NTA, BCOS and Channels TV, where governance is a one-man business and where the only opportunity you have to see the lawmaker representing you is during campaigns—where youth are used only as election machineries by allocating portfolios that have no direct impact on their life career—where no one is expected to know how opportunities and everything that concerns the constituency are shared.

In the last eighteen months, Hon. Adepoju has touched virtually every area of human needs, but one thing stands out: his penchant for fair sharing across the five communities he represents.

Hon. Adepoju will go to any length to secure opportunities for his people, just as he always says that the job of a lawmaker is to seek opportunity where it is most difficult. A practical example of such happened just in December 2024; he had met with one of the influential DGs of a commission in one of his visits to offices, as it is typical of him to hunt for opportunities for his constituents. He initiated conversation with the DG, and after some minutes, she requested that Hon. Adepoju nominate one constituent for a placement in the commission. He didn’t waste time to say, “Madam, I am bringing two qualified candidates and not just one;” the DG insisted that the candidate should be one. When it was time to submit the curriculum vitae of the candidate, Ibarapakan submitted two.

I told him, but the woman said one. He replied, “Hassan, if one candidate is possible, two is also possible for an opportunity like this. If we are able to get the two, two communities will be able to share while we consider other communities next time.” I am not surprised by his position, because on many occasions, we ended up getting numerous opportunities that ordinarily we are not supposed to simply because there is no limit to the extent to which a lawmaker lobbies. That is why I say often that the first skill people should look for in any aspiring lawmaker is his ability to lobby.

A lawmaker is like a hunter who wakes every day to prepare his gun, catapult and other hunting equipment with hope to come back home with bush meat he never reared or kept somewhere in the bush. There are times Dr’s gun fails to catch ‘meat’ and just like a dedicated, responsible hunter who has a lot of mouths to feed, he comes back home dejected. He, however, learns from these experiences and builds on them.

Sometimes, he consoles himself that it is only God who has the power to grant every wish, but even He doesn’t grant us all our desires. Opportunities are not readily available in Abuja; you set out to look for them and your hunting skill will either make or mar your constituency. That is why any constituency that elected a lawmaker who doesn’t believe in the power of strong relationships should prepare to suffer the consequences.

Happy birthday, Dr. Your legacy will undoubtedly continue to inspire future generations of leaders and I believe history will be kind to you. On the occasion of your birthday, I wish you longevity, sound health, wisdom and understanding to continue to steer the ship of our beloved constituency. May your reign be long.

Hassan Adesodi Olaoniye
Special Adviser to Hon. (Dr.) Adebayo Adepoju
(Media and Publicity)
January 19, 2025