The historical account offered at the flag-off of the reconstruction of the Ibadan–Ijebu-Ode Road, particularly the statement attributed to the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Works, Senator Allwell Onyesoh, that the road was conceived in 1965 during the administration of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, informed my decision to put pen to paper.
With the greatest respect, history says otherwise.
There is an immediate chronological problem: Chief Obafemi Awolowo was not Premier of the Western Region in 1965. Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola was. Awolowo had relinquished the premiership years earlier. More fundamentally, contemporary records establish that the road itself was already in existence. The World Bank’s 1965 appraisal describes the Idi-Ayunre–Ijebu-Ode Road as an existing road, already carrying approximately 700 vehicles daily, 65 per cent of them trucks and buses. Its 12-foot-wide surface was considered structurally inadequate and its alignment poor. What commenced in 1965, therefore, was not the conception of
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