By The Ondo State House of Assembly set out on Thursday to do what 21 of its 26 members had already signed up for, which was to remove Speaker Olamide Oladiji from office. What it got instead was a standoff at the gate.
Three unknown men, alleged to be political thugs, showed up at the Assembly complex just as lawmakers were gathering for the parliamentary session meant to seal the impeachment. It took police from the state command to clear them out. By the time the dust settled, the planned floor vote never happened, though the legislators didn’t leave empty-handed. They pushed ahead with a parliamentary meeting on the premises anyway, unwilling to let the day go to waste entirely.
One lawmaker, speaking on condition of anonymity, didn’t mince words about what he believed had just played out. “He sent thugs to the Assembly to attack us, but he was disappointed. We sent them out, but we did not hold plenary again. But we will still meet to impeach him,” he said, framing the day’s disruption as a last, failed gambit by a Speaker running out of road.
The crisis behind Thursday’s chaos has been building for weeks. At its center is an allegation that Oladiji diverted ₦44 million meant for reordering the budget of the Ondo State Oil Producing Areas Development Commission, a claim serious enough to push more than four-fifths of the Assembly to put their names to an impeachment notice. Lawmakers gave him a choice: resign, or face removal on the floor of the House. Governor Lucky Aiyedatiwa and the state’s APC leadership stepped in to slow the process down, but slowing it down, it turns out, isn’t the same as stopping it.
Olatunji Fabiyi, Chairman of the House Committee on Information, made that distinction clear in a phone call shortly before Thursday’s meeting. “We have been hearing news that we have abandoned the process. This is a lie and misinformation. We are still on it; he can’t be our Speaker again,” he said, adding that the governor’s conversations with members hadn’t changed the outcome. “There is no going back.”
Oladiji tells a different story altogether, one where there is no crisis left to resolve. He denies sending anyone to disrupt the Assembly, insisting the men in question were simply members of his constituency who had come to pick up recruitment forms and wandered into a situation they didn’t understand. “They are not new and have been coming to the House of Assembly, but they insisted that they did not want to see them on the premises,” he said, describing how he personally tried to calm the room before the visitors were asked to leave.
As far as Oladiji is concerned, the governor and party leaders have already closed the book on this. “There’s nothing like an impeachment notice. There is nothing like an impeachment process, and we were able to resolve the whole matter,” he maintained.
Two accounts, one Assembly, and a Speaker’s fate still hanging somewhere between a signed notice and a governor’s intervention. Whatever “resolved” means to Oladiji, the lawmakers behind the impeachment drive clearly haven’t gotten the memo, and by their own word, they’re not planning to.
