Fatai Ibikunle: The Progressive Movement’s Perennial Trojan Horse in Oyo State

By: Akinjide Babalola

During the Trojan War, the Greeks could not defeat the city of Troy by force because of its high walls. So they built a giant wooden horse, hid soldiers inside it, and left it outside Troy’s gate as a supposed gift. The Trojans brought the horse inside their city. At night, the hidden soldiers came out and opened the gates for the Greek army, leading to Troy’s fall.

In politics today, “Trojan horse” is used as a metaphor to describe:
A person or group who pretends to be loyal to a party, organization, or cause, but secretly works from within to weaken, sabotage, or destroy it for the benefit of an opponent. It implies deception from the inside, not open opposition from the outside.
‎
‎Oyo State’s progressive movement has its own wooden horse, wheeled in and celebrated more than once, and it has a name: Fatai Ibikunle.
‎
‎Every generation, the progressive family in this state produces men who build, and men who burrow from within. Ibikunle has, time and again, positioned himself as the latter, a man who wears the progressive colours in daylight and works against the progressive cause after dark. But strip away the rhetoric, the rallies, the photographs, and what is left is not ideology at all. It is appetite. With Fatai Ibikunle, the “progressive” label has never been a conviction, it has been a costume, worn only for as long as it serves his stomach, and discarded the moment loyalty demands sacrifice instead of reward.
‎
‎Go back to the era of the late Gov. Lam Adesina. Fatai Ibikunle was reportedly deployed as a weapon against Lam Adesina’s leadership, part of the internal sabotage that weakened a government that should have been shielded by unity, not undermined by betrayal from within its own ranks. Even then, the pattern was visible to those willing to see it: this was never a man fighting for a cause. This was a man positioning himself for whatever the moment could feed him.
‎
‎Fast-forward to the Ajimobi years, and the story does not change, it only repeats. Rather than stand with the progressive structure that had carried the party to power, Fatai Ibikunle stood against the late Gov. Abiola Ajimobi, lending his name, his network, and his influence to forces working to frustrate a sitting progressive administration. This was not a disagreement over policy or a principled internal dissent. This was a man auctioning his loyalty to the highest bidder while still draped in progressive garb — proof, if any was still needed, that the belly has always outvoted the badge.
‎
‎Then came 2019. Once again, when the party needed unity to hold the line against a resurgent PDP machine, Fatai Ibikunle worked against it, undercutting the very structure he claims allegiance to, at the exact moment loyalty was required. The result speaks for itself: a party that fractured internally handed its enemies an opening they did not have to work hard to find, courtesy of a man who has never once put the cause above his own comfort.
‎
‎Three governors. Three election cycles. One man, always found standing against the progressive cause at the moment it mattered most, and always somehow better fed for it. This is no longer a story of isolated disagreements or political growing pains. This is the record of a man for whom “progressive” was never a belief system, only a costume he puts on to gain entry, and takes off the moment the real business of self-interest begins.
‎
‎Now, as Oyo State approaches another defining electoral cycle, the same actor has positioned himself again, mouthing the same progressive language, wearing the same borrowed colours and those who have watched this movie before are not waiting for the credits to know how it ends. A man does not change his stomach because the season has changed.
‎
‎The question party stakeholders and grassroots coordinators across the 33 LGAs must now ask, bluntly, is this: how many times can one man be found on the wrong side of every progressive battle in this state and still be fed at the progressive table, before the party admits the “progressive” in Fatai Ibikunle was always a hoax? At what point does the party stop mistaking his hunger for his conviction?
‎
‎A Trojan horse only works once it’s trusted. It does not need to storm the gate, it only needs to be let in, smiling, speaking the right slogans, while its true business is the business of the belly. Oyo’s progressives have opened that gate three times already, and paid for it three times over. The wise ones do not need a fourth reminder. Oyo’s progressives would do well to remember that history, and stop mistaking an empty stomach dressed in progressive colours for a progressive heart.

Akunjide Babalola, a public affairs analyst and social critic, writes from Ibarapa East Local Government Area of Oyo State.
‎
‎