.BTO Is Not Your Excuse
Ondo Uncensored
Dr Debo Akinbami has found his voice again, and we should be glad for it. Since his reappointment as Senior Special Assistant to the Governor of Ondo State on Public Communication, he has picked up his pen with a renewed energy that his principal’s image badly needs. We hope this gragra lasts. We hope it spreads to every other appointee who has been sitting on their hands while the governor’s reputation takes hit after hit in the public square. But energy without accuracy is just noise, and Dr Akinbami’s latest piece, aimed at Hon. Olubunmi Tunji-Ojo, is long on grievance and short on fact.
Read the piece again and you will notice something curious. It never quite manages to name a single thing the minister has done to hurt Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa. What it offers instead is atmosphere, elders meeting in Akure, a schemer harvesting the vulnerable, a governorship ambition dressed up in the president’s name. It reads well. It says nothing. And that is the whole problem with the BTO excuse, it has become so familiar in Alagbaka that it no longer needs evidence, only repetition.
Here is what is actually true. Ondo State is lagging behind its peers, and Ondo people are the ones saying so, not the minister. The governor’s cabinet is not united, and that disunity did not walk in from Abuja, it grew inside the government house. Party members are complaining about leadership, about direction, about a reconciliation process that limps along more in press statements than in results. None of that is the minister’s doing. It is governance, and governance is the governor’s job, not Hon. Tunji-Ojo’s.
Yet somehow, whenever the questions get uncomfortable, the answer is always the same. BTO this, BTO that. It has become a reflex, an excuse reached for before the facts are even checked, and Ondo people have noticed. Every hardship gets a minister’s name attached to it, as if he sits in Alagbaka approving budgets and choosing commissioners. He does not. If the government is underperforming, the person to look at is the person who leads it, not the man being blamed for it from three hundred kilometres away.
Let us be fair, because fairness costs nothing. If genuine party members have real grievances, if there are honest questions about unity and accountability, those deserve to be raised and answered on their own terms. Nobody is asking Dr Akinbami or anyone else to stop holding leaders accountable, that is his job too. But accountability cuts both ways, and turning every legitimate question about the governor’s performance into a referendum on the minister’s supposed ambition is not accountability. It is deflection dressed up as analysis.
And here is the part that should embarrass anyone still pushing this line. The same minister being accused of quietly working against President Tinubu’s re-election is, by any honest reading of the public record, one of the people doing the most to secure it. Look at the political structures springing up across the state in the president’s name and you will find his fingerprints and his funding. Look at the articles being published praising the president’s achievements and check the bylines, a good number of them belong to people close to the minister, some to the minister himself, out there in newsroom after newsroom making the case for Tinubu’s second term. That is not the behaviour of a man plotting sabotage. That is the behaviour of a man doing the work while others write op-eds.
So before the next column blaming BTO for a governor’s poor optics, ask a simpler question. What has the state government itself done this month to unite the party, to reassure anxious members, to give Ondo people a reason to believe things are improving? If the honest answer is not much, then the piece practically writes itself, and it will not need the minister’s name in it at all.
Dr Akinbami is a learned man and a capable writer, and that talent should be spent on substance, not on recycling a convenient villain every time his principal needs cover. We all understand that he must do his principal’s bidding. That is the job. But doing the job well means being objective enough to leave the aimless accusations to the hallelujah boys and speak to the facts instead. Ondo State does not need another round of BTO did it. It needs a government that stops outsourcing its shortcomings to a minister who, if the record is read honestly, has spent the last two years building things while his accusers have spent it building excuses.
