A youth group, the Ibadan Youth Vanguard, has reacted to an article written by Festus Adedayo, titled “The Lagos Boy’s Coastal Highway,” describing it as a trash sheet full of labyrinth of lies and fallacies meant to deface and confuse history.
A statement signed by its National General Secretary, Akin Akingbade, reads:
“Festus Adedayo could be described as a brilliant writer if he wasn’t afflicted with a form of mental disability for which he should seek immediate treatment.
Reading Adedayo is an unpleasant adventure into a labyrinth of confusion. ‘The Lagos Boy’s Coastal Highway’ sounds like an incoherent tale of a drunken sailor determined to deface history.
It would have been easily dismissed had it not been woven around gaping fallacies and beer parlor gossip portrayed as historical truth.
Some may say that the article was targeted at President Tinubu’s Coastal highway, and that in true Adedayo style, Chief Bode George took a stray bullet. Well, that may have been accepted had he not deliberately told outright lies meant to throw Chief Bode George into the arena of public opprobrium.
Let us set the record straight: there were rumors that Mrs. Feyi George, when she was First Lady and married to Chief Bode George, slapped Mrs. Ajayi, but they were mere beer parlor rumors spread by ne’er-do-wells who also salted the story with colorful tales of Mrs. Ajayi responding with a barrage of slaps. Only a man with a drunken pen, such as Festus Adedayo, would pick such an old-age motor park gossip and present it as truth. The truth is that nobody slapped anybody. The same Mrs. Ajayi is still very much friends with the George family and makes sure to check on the former military administrator from time to time, including a call to him just last week. Chief Rotimi Williams instituted a case against the Concord Newspapers which published the story at the time, for publishing false news.
Indeed, family and friends of Mr. Adedayo should place a call and book him a room at the nearest mental health facility.
His assertions that Bode George left no legacies in Ondo can only come from a place of inebriation or deep psychological imbalance because projects aren’t erased, they are there for all to see.
Truth is, all the infrastructures that were commissioned by Chief Bode George are still there for all to see. The government houses, the stadium, Owena Motel, to mention a few, were legacies Bode George left behind. The whole streets of Akure were lighted up, a thing that no state with the exception of Lagos had at the time.
It is still recorded in history for those who weren’t born that Adedayo wishes to blindside in his article that Chief Bode George, then Captain Bode George, invited all the Yoruba Obas to Akure to foster unity among the Obas, those who were alive remember that only the Alaafin of Oyo did not attend the meeting.
It is noteworthy that Chief Bode George wasn’t crowned the Atona of Odua for nothing. He had been in the forefront of a united Odua region.
The Ibadan Youth Vanguard is determined to protect all leaders of our region against predators of lies and those seeking cheap popularity by peddling falsehood.
We therefore advise Festus Adedayo and his drunken pen to stop distorting history, peddling lies and labelling our elders for the benefit of traffic to the tangled spider web he calls writing.
Signed:
Akin Akingbade,
National General Secretary, Ibadan Youth Vanguard
15/4/2023
