By Osogbo — The Osun State Government has pushed back hard against a front-page report in the Tribune newspaper, insisting the poorly constructed road pictured in the story has nothing to do with the current administration of Governor Ademola Adeleke and was in fact built years earlier under his predecessor, Gboyega Oyetola.
In a statement issued on Tuesday by the Ministry of Works, Permanent Secretary Engr. Bashiru Bello disputed not just who built the road, but where it is. According to the ministry, the road shown in the Tribune publication is located at Mukoro, in Ile-Ife, not Modakeke, as the report stated. The ministry said it had attached GPS coordinates for the road to allow members of the public to verify the location themselves through a simple Google search.
Beyond the location dispute, the ministry drew a technical distinction to back its claim. It said any road project initiated under the current administration has not yet progressed to the stage of lane marking, a detail clearly visible on the road pictured in the Tribune report. On that basis, the government argued, the road in question could not possibly be one of Adeleke’s projects, since it hasn’t reached that construction phase on any of the roads it is currently building.
Government Frames It as Inherited Damage, Not New Failure
The ministry went further, framing the episode as part of a broader trend rather than an isolated dispute. It said the Adeleke administration has spent much of its time in office carrying out remedial and corrective work on projects it inherited in poor condition from the Oyetola government, and cast the attempt to blame the current administration for such defects as a deliberate strategy by the Osun chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to offload responsibility for its own record.
Closing the statement, the ministry urged Osun residents not to simply take its word for it, encouraging them to independently verify the road’s origin and location using the GPS coordinates it said it had provided. The government described the Tribune publication as “fake news” and called the opposition’s broader effort to link road defects to the current government “deceitful.”
The dispute lands in the middle of a tense run-up to Osun’s August 15 governorship election, in which Adeleke is seeking a second term against opposition figures aligned with Oyetola. It is not the first time the state government has issued a rebuttal of this kind; Osun officials have previously pushed back against similar reports linking road failures to the current administration, arguing in past cases as well that the projects in question were awarded, and in some cases abandoned, during the Oyetola years.
