FOI Request Filed. Costs Remain Secret. Ijebu Communities Left Holding Empty Arenas.
*By Adewale Ajibosin
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When the Ogun State Government announced the hosting of the 22nd Gateway Games, sports enthusiasts across the state expected the obvious: that the Dipo Dina International Stadium in Ijebu-Ode, one of the most impressive sports facilities in Southwest Nigeria, would anchor the competition as a flagship venue. It did not. Neither did the Sagamu Stadium, another international-standard facility sitting fully equipped within the state's territory.
Instead, Governor Dapo Abiodun's administration quietly entered into what sources describe as a "management deal" with private sporting centres and at least one higher institution, channelling thousands of athletes, officials, and support personnel through non-government facilities, at costs that remain, to this day, deliberately hidden from the public.
The questions that follow are not merely administrative. They cut to the heart of governance, ethnic equity, fiscal transparency, and the calculated marginalisation of a people whose infrastructure investment was built precisely for moments like this.
The facts on ground are difficult to dispute. Ijebu-Ode hosts the Dipo Dina International Stadium, a facility constructed and upgraded to international specification. It has the seating capacity, the track and field infrastructure, the floodlighting, and the ancillary support systems expected of a modern multi-sport venue.
Within proximity sits a Games Village comparable in concept and structure to the celebrated Afuze Camp in Edo State, a facility that has successfully housed large contingents of athletes and officials during inter-state competitions. A functional NYSC orientation camp, equipped with residential blocks, kitchens, recreational spaces, and security perimeters, sits nearby, ready-made for the accommodation demands of a state-level sporting festival.
Sagamu contributes an additional layer: its own stadium, also meeting international standards, strategically located along one of Nigeria's busiest transport corridors, with unmatched accessibility for delegations arriving from Lagos, Ibadan, and beyond.
The state possessed, in the Ijebu corridor alone, a self-contained sporting complex capable of hosting the Gateway Games from opening ceremony to medal presentation. Infrastructure. Accommodation. Logistics. All present. All idle.
Governor Dapo Abiodun chose none of it.
What the Abiodun administration chose instead is where the story darkens considerably. Government sources confirm that a "management deal" was executed with private operators, routing the hosting infrastructure of the 22nd Gateway Games away from state-owned public facilities toward privately controlled venues and the premises of a higher institution.
The total cost of this arrangement remains unknown to the public.
A civil society organisation, acting under the provisions of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, formally filed a request demanding a full breakdown of public expenditure related to the 22nd Gateway Games, covering venue hire, accommodation, logistics, feeding, security, and all ancillary costs tied to the management deal.
That request has not been meaningfully honoured.
No itemised budget has been released. No contract documents have been published. No procurement records have been made available. The
government that prides itself on transparency has met a basic constitutional FOI demand with institutional silence.
This is not bureaucratic delay. It is a deliberate suppression of public accountability information tied to what independent analysts estimate could run into hundreds of millions of naira in public funds.
The question that demands an answer: if the deal was legitimate, lawful, and value-for-money, why the secrecy?
Before interrogating Abiodun's conduct further, the public record demands that an established standard of excellence be placed on the table for direct comparison.
In 2006, the Ogun State Government under the leadership of Otunba Gbenga Daniel hosted an edition of the Gateway Games that remains, by every measurable index, the gold standard for games management in the state's history. The numbers are not disputed: the government realised N792 million in revenue from the Games and expended N702 million, leaving a surplus of N90 million. The Gateway Games turned a profit. Public money was not only accounted for to the naira; it generated a return.
But the financial record is only part of the story. Under Otunba Daniel's administration, Ogun State did something no host state had ever done in the entire history of the Gateway Games: it accommodated and fed every competing athlete from all states of the federation, entirely at the state government's expense. From Rivers to Sokoto, from Borno to Lagos, every delegation was housed, catered for, and treated as a guest of Ogun State. It was a logistical undertaking of historic proportions, executed without fanfare and without excuses.
That unprecedented act of sporting hospitality was not accidental. It reflected a deliberate philosophy of governance: that public events funded by public resources must deliver public value, measurable, transparent, and inclusive.
Nineteen years later, under Dapo Abiodun, the outgoing governor of Ogun State, he cannot produce a single document showing what the 22nd Gateway Games cost, who was paid, or on what basis public-owned stadiums were bypassed in favour of privately held facilities. The contrast is not subtle. It is a complete institutional collapse of the standard that Otunba Daniel set.
If the Daniel administration could host a Games that fed every athlete in Nigeria, generated a N90 million profit, and accounted for every kobo, there is no administrative, technical, or financial justification for the Abiodun administration's refusal to disclose basic expenditure data for its own edition. None. The precedent exists. The benchmark is documented. The excuse of complexity does not hold.
To understand why the deliberate exclusion of Ijebu-Ode and its facilities carries weight beyond administrative preference, one must situate this decision within a visible pattern of conduct under the Abiodun administration.
The Ijebu people, one of the most historically organised and commercially active sub-groups in Yorubaland, have watched with growing frustration as a governor who owes the entirety of his political fortunes to the Ogun State political structure has consistently failed to reflect Ijebu interests in state policy, appointments, and infrastructure prioritisation.
The Gateway Games was not merely a sporting event. For communities in Ijebu-Ode and its environs, it represented a rare and legitimate opportunity for economic activation. Hosting thousands of athletes and officials translates directly into hotel bookings, food vendor revenues, transportation income, retail trade, and the broader hospitality economy. These are real earnings for market women, bus operators, provision sellers, sachet water producers, and the informal economy workers who constitute the backbone of Ijebu commercial life.
Dapo Abiodun took that opportunity and handed it elsewhere.
By routing the Games away from the Dipo Dina Stadium and the Ijebu Games Village, his administration denied Ijebu-Ode the economic multiplier effect that sporting festivals of this scale are specifically designed to generate for host communities. It is, in the assessment of civil society observers tracking the administration, a deliberate act of economic exclusion dressed in the language of administrative discretion.
The 2006 edition demonstrated that hosting the Games creates measurable economic circulation within the host community. Abiodun did not merely fail to replicate that model. He inverted it, stripping Ijebu communities of the economic dividend that public infrastructure, built with their taxes, was meant to deliver.
The investigative record as it stands generates the following specific, unanswered questions for the Abiodun administration:
**On Infrastructure:** What technical assessment, if any, was conducted to determine that the Dipo Dina International Stadium, the Sagamu Stadium, the Ijebu Games Village, and the adjacent NYSC Camp were unfit or insufficient to host the 22nd Gateway Games? Were any such reports produced? If so, they must be published.
**On Procurement:** Through what process was the "management deal" with private sporting centres and the higher institution awarded? Was it open tender, restricted bid, or sole sourcing? Who are the beneficial owners of the private entities that received public funds?
**On Cost:** What is the total sum of public money expended on the 22nd Gateway Games? What portion went to private operators? How does this compare to the documented N702 million expenditure of the 2006 edition, which generated a N90 million surplus? How does it compare to the cost of utilising the state's own facilities?
**On the FOI Request:** Under what legal justification has the government failed to honour a duly filed Freedom of Information request? The FOI Act is not optional. Non-compliance is a justiciable matter.
**On Equity:** Does the Abiodun administration maintain any internal policy framework for geographic equity in the distribution of state-sponsored economic activities? If so, how does the exclusion of Ijebu-Ode from the Gateway Games satisfy that framework?
**On the Historic Standard:** In 2006, Ogun State accommodated and fed every athlete from all 36 states, a first in the Games' history, and still returned a profit. What did the 22nd Gateway Games deliver by comparison, and at what cost to the Ogun State taxpayer?
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## The Verdict of Infrastructure
There is a particular cruelty embedded in what happened at Ijebu-Ode. Public funds, drawn from the collective resources of Ogun State, were used to build and maintain a world-class stadium in that city. A Games Village was constructed with the explicit purpose of supporting exactly the kind of large-scale sporting event the Gateway Games represents. Yet when the moment arrived, the man entrusted with governing the state looked at those facilities, looked at the Ijebu people who live and work in their shadow, and decided they were not worthy of the investment's return.
The Dipo Dina International Stadium did not fail the Gateway Games. The Gateway Games was kept away from Dipo Dina International Stadium.
That distinction is not semantic. It is political. It is deliberate. And it has a name.
The 2006 edition stands as permanent, documented proof that the Gateway Games can be hosted profitably, transparently, and with historic generosity, using state infrastructure, without secrecy, without private management deals, and without bypassing the communities that deserve the economic benefits most. Otunba Gbenga Daniel set that standard. Dapo Abiodun has not met it. He has not even attempted to.
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## Conclusion: Silence Is Not Governance
Governor Dapo Abiodun has 48 hours to respond to this publication with specific, documented answers to the questions raised above. His media office, his Sports Commissioner, and his Attorney General, whose office bears responsibility for FOI compliance, have been notified of this inquiry.
In the absence of credible, documented responses, this publication will proceed on the established record: that the 22nd Gateway Games was used as an instrument to direct public expenditure toward private and institutional interests; that world-class Ijebu infrastructure was deliberately sidelined; that the economic rights of Ijebu communities were deliberately denied; that a Freedom of Information request lawfully filed under Nigerian statute has been treated with contempt; and that a governor who inherited a documented standard of excellence in games management has chosen opacity over accountability, private gain over public benefit, and political exclusion over equitable governance.
The Ijebu people will not forget. Neither, on this occasion, will the public record.
