Spirytus, a rectified grain spirit distilled in Poland to 96% ABV, holds the distinction of being the most potent commercially available spirit on earth. It achieves this by undergoing multiple distillations, each pass stripping away everything except pure, undiluted alcohol. Nothing remains but the fire itself.
This is precisely the level at which Seyi Makinde’s ambition is currently operating. Every successive distillation of his political calculus has stripped away the residue of reasoning until what is left is pure, uncut wanting.
And yet, let no one persuade him otherwise.
Four years ago, would Senator Ifeanyi Okowa have paused if someone had pulled him aside and walked him, patiently and soberly, through the sheer folly of his position? That moment when Southern leaders had already resolved to unite behind a Southern candidate after eight unbroken years of Northern presidency? He would not have, despite hosting the conference where that resolution was made.
Some lessons cannot be taught. They can only be lived. The political atmosphere, too, would be considerably less interesting without someone willing to play the role of Makinde, the man who goes against the will of his own people with the serene confidence of a man who believes he is the will of his people.
Today he has flipped his coat, ready to eat the crumbs at his master’s table.
Once, he saw himself as a defender of regional equity and advocate of power shift. In 2023, as part of the PDP’s G5, he moved from Port Harcourt to Asaba, Enugu to Ibadan insisting that the South must reclaim the presidency after eight uninterrupted years of Northern rule. He spoke then with the conviction of a man defending a settled truth. Now the same language of principle slips off him like clothing no longer tailored to his size. Historians often point to leaders such as Samuel Doe in Liberia, whose pursuit of personal survival led him to sideline the very constituency that had lifted him to power, only to discover that ambition without ballast eventually turns inward. Makinde is not Doe, but the caution is familiar: when a politician treats conviction as something to be worn and discarded, it is the wearer who ends up exposed.
It is also curious to hear him speak of worsening poverty in the last three years as though he were a visiting auditor rather than the man who has governed Oyo State for seven. In that period, cumulative accruals from FAAC to both the state and LGAs, based on national disbursement patterns, would conservatively exceed ₦1.5–₦1.8 trillion in nominal terms. In 2024 alone, Oyo State Government received roughly ₦113 billion from FAAC, according to The Nation’s breakdown of state allocations. Internally generated revenue was also projected to cross the ₦100 billion per annum mark by 2025. Under Seyi Makinde, Oyo State has received more revenue than at any time in its recent history, yet the question of how many people have been lifted out of poverty under his watch remains suspended in the air like a note no one wants to claim. The local governments, closest to the daily struggles he now invokes, were denied direct access to their allocations under a centralised pool he controlled, despite a Supreme Court judgment to the contrary. It is a strange arithmetic: to lament poverty while withholding the very instruments designed to fight it.
There is an irony worth noting, of course. A man who has built a reputation as a serial violator of democratic norms, who has trampled, with casual disregard, on the very principles he now invokes as a shield, has no moral standing to appoint himself the guardian of democracy. That ship sailed. But standing and rights are different things, and Makinde retains the right, as any citizen does, to pitch his political tent wherever the wind takes his fancy.
As a leader trusted by the Oyo people to use their resources to alleviate poverty, perhaps Makinde should ask whether the approximately ₦11.57 billion he spent on foreign trips between January and June 2024, according to Punch and BudgIT, could have been deployed more meaningfully. The Punch report noted it was among the highest travel expenditures by any state government in that period, with all 36 states collectively spending ₦69.7 billion, of which Oyo alone accounted for ₦11.5 billion.
It is also shocking when a leader who should know the details of the micro‑ and macro‑economic rot Tinubu inherited stands on a podium, showboating and lamenting poverty without acknowledging the rot and the measures taken to prevent Nigeria from becoming another Zimbabwe or Venezuela. History teaches that the kind of excavating reforms Tinubu is undertaking do not translate into a complete turnaround in two or three years. They are gradual, often taking five to ten years before yielding visible results. If in doubt, one need only revisit the early years of Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, when rapid industrialisation, strict governance, and painful restructuring provoked public anger before eventually transforming the island into a global economic powerhouse.
So let him go. Let him mount his horse and ride toward whatever horizon he has convinced himself is waiting for him. When he invoked “Operation Wetie,” either as coded incitement or warning, he has not yet learned what violence truly means, not the metaphorical kind, not the kind that reshapes political fortunes and leaves men standing in rubble wondering where the ground went. He should find out for himself.
None of the bravado troubles me. What I am watching, carefully, is something else entirely: his reported designs on the Olubadan stool, the prospect that he might leverage one of Yorubaland’s most organised and stable institutions as a staging ground for installing a political successor.
That is a different matter. That is the moment the proverb becomes a warning, not a witticism: “khaki no be leather.” He will discover, soon enough, that certain things do not stretch.
