Opinion

Dele Alake: The dilemma of a Minister

Published

5 months ago

April 27, 2026

Chigozin Obinna

Ekiti representation concerns grow as editorial questions balance between national duties and local impact of federal leadership

By Bolanle BOLAWOLE

A few days ago, I came across the piece you will soon read here now and was attracted to it by the message; the medium of the message; and the personality the message was addressed to.

Also read: Even Tinubu is not sure if Wale Edun resigned or was sacked

The message is of public interest. The medium of the message – Treasure newspaper.com – and its publisher, Adeniran Emmanuel, are well known to me. The “big man” to whom the message was directed is my professional colleague and contemporary.

“Delistic” is how I hail him! “Boly-Boly”, he would respond. My wife and, indeed, all her mates, have fond memories of Dele’s father, who was their principal at the Lagos Baptist Secondary School, Oke-Odo, Agege, Lagos state. Pa Michael Ojo Alake aka Baba was a disciplinarian and a role model that his former students still have fond memories of up to this day.

He is reputed as the inspiration for the Old Students’ association they later formed, and which has attracted wide recognition, winning many laurels from the Lagos state government. Baba Alake, from Ikoro-Ekiti, died in 1984.

Treasure newspaper.com, an online publication, wrote a massive editorial titled “The Dele Alake Question: Results in Abuja, but what about Ekiti?”; the editorial was delectable. Maybe I should let you read it first. When we return, I will pass comments:

“When President Bola Ahmed Tinubu appointed Henry Dele Alake as Minister of Solid Minerals Development in August 2023, Ekiti State celebrated. Gov. Biodun Oyebanji called him ‘very experienced, hardworking and capable’ and thanked the President for giving Ekiti ‘an illustrious citizen’ at the federal table.

“Thirty-two months later, a different conversation dominates Ekiti’s markets and WhatsApp groups. It was captured in a single Facebook post last week: ‘Who is the minister representing Ekiti at the federal capital, Abuja? It is as good as having no representative!’ The frustration is not about Alake’s competence. It is about presence.

“The case for the minister: No fair observer can deny that Dr. Alake has worked. Under his watch, solid minerals revenue leapt from N16 billion in 2023 to over N70 billion in 2025. He presented gold bars to the President, shoring up $5 million for our reserves.

Continentally, his peers re-elected him chairman of the Africa Minerals Strategic Group in Riyadh this year – a vote of confidence Tinubu himself praised.

“He has not ignored Ekiti entirely. When the Presidency released palliatives, Alake channeled 1,200 bags of rice to elderly citizens in the state, promising that widows, orphans and students would be next.

His media office insists that he ‘supports the current administration of Gov. Biodun Oyebanji (and) will continue to contribute to the growth and progress of Ekiti State.’

“His team also argues, with merit, that a minister serves the federation, not a senatorial district. His brief – to ‘make the solid minerals sector a major revenue earner (and) create thousands of high-paying jobs’ – is national, and Abuja is where that work happens.

“The case for the people: Yet, representation is measured in two currencies: results and presence. On results, Alake scores. On presence, the ledger is thin.

“Ekiti is not Zamfara or Kogi; we have no sprawling mines to commission. So the minister’s victories – AMSG chairmanship, mining marshals, MoUs with South Africa – land in the news, not on the ground in Ikoro or Ise. That is the structural reality of his portfolio.

But it is compounded by a political choice: Alake has deliberately distanced himself from state politics, dismissing governorship posters as ‘fake’ and insisting he is ‘too busy’ for Ekiti elections ‘now or in the future.’

“In avoiding politicking, he has also avoided the town halls, the school visits, the borehole projects that other ministers use to keep a finger on their home pulse. The constitution does not demand those visits. Public sentiment does.

“Dimension stone and granite processing hub: Ekiti State sits on large deposits of granite and other dimension stones; yet, Nigeria still imports polished granite for major projects.

A federal processing hub in Ekiti would fit squarely within the Ministry of Solid Minerals’ mandate because Minister Dele Alake has said the sector must ‘create thousands of high-paying jobs for Nigerians’ and move beyond raw extraction to value addition.

Despite that alignment, no federal granite or dimension-stone hub has been announced for Ekiti since he took office.

“Gemstone cutting and polishing school: The Ijero axis of Ekiti is known for tourmaline, aquamarine, and other semi-precious stones.

Setting up a gemstone cutting and polishing school in Ado-Ekiti would advance the Ministry’s stated goal of integrating artisanal miners into the formal economy while building the skilled workforce needed for value-added exports.

At the moment, there is no training center or lapidary school tied to the Ministry in the state.

“Kaolin-to-pharma and paint pilot: Ekiti has commercial kaolin deposits, a mineral used in pharmaceuticals, paints, and ceramics that Nigeria largely imports.

A pilot project to process Ekiti kaolin for domestic industries would support the Tinubu administration’s Renewed Hope Agenda on import substitution and industrialization – both themes Alake has linked to his reforms. However, no pilot plant or kaolin beneficiation project has been flagged off in Ekiti.

“Formalizing Ekiti’s artisanal miners: Nationwide, the Ministry is registering artisanal mining cooperatives as part of its push to curb illegal mining and grow revenue, which has already risen from N16 billion to over N70 billion.

Ekiti has informal quarry workers and gemstone pickers who would benefit from cooperatives, licensing, and access to equipment. Still, there are no published figures on how many Ekiti cooperatives have been onboarded, and no state-specific numbers have been released.

“Geoscience data for Ekiti: The Nigeria-South Africa mining MoU that Alake signed covers UAV remote sensing, geoscience mapping, and advanced laboratory technology like LA-ICP-MS – tools that can prove the size and grade of mineral deposits to attract investors. Ekiti’s pegmatite and industrial mineral belts would be prime candidates for such surveys. Yet, no survey flight, mapping exercise or geodata release has been announced for the state.

“Our stand: Treasure Newspaper does not join the call for Dr. Alake to abandon his national assignment. Nigeria needs a solid minerals sector that works, and his reforms are beginning to deliver. We also reject the cynical view that ‘no visit means no work.’ That is lazy politics.

“But we do ask for balance. A minister is not a commissioner; yet, he remains the only Ekiti voice in the Federal Executive Council. That voice must be heard and seen.

Presence does not require weekly homecoming, but it does require deliberate touchpoints: quarterly ministerial briefings in Ado-Ekiti, solid minerals skills programs for our technical colleges, and clear advocacy for federal projects that site infrastructure in Ekiti where geology allows.

“Gov. Oyebanji cannot be the minister’s proxy forever. If Dr. Alake is indeed ‘a proud son of the soil’, the soil should feel him beyond bags of rice.

“Ekiti gave Nigeria a strategist. We are proud of that. Now we ask the strategist to remember that strategy without people is just a memo in Abuja. Representing Ekiti means bringing Abuja’s weight to Ekiti’s ground – at least often enough that no citizen has to ask, ‘Who is our minister?’

“Minister Dele Alake should consider and factor Ekiti State into the activities of his current Ministry of Mines and Solid Minerals in Abuja and remember his home State for good. He should know that there is life after leaving office.”

Questions, questions, questions! Is this well-written editorial factually correct? Is it true that Ekiti is yet to benefit from its Minister? Maybe, like Oliver Twist, the writers of this editorial are only asking for more.

Again, is it not too early to jump into conclusions? The patient dog, they say, eats the fattest bones. Could the mission of this editorial be to function as a reminder to the Honourable Minister that “We are still here o! We dey loyal o”?

Maybe Ekiti should give Dele more time! More often than not, southerners in power are more circumspect than their northern counterparts when it comes to channeling Federal largesse to their home base.

But charity begins from home. Sir Thomas Browne, English author and polymath, is reputed to have first made this statement in his 1642 publication titled “Religio Medici.”

Whereas Dele is an accomplished journalist, he is undeniably also a politician.

He held office as Commissioner for Information in Lagos state for a record eight years during the governorship of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

He is today a Minister of the Federal Republic, representing Ekiti state, according to this editorial.

Thomas (Tip) O’Neil Jr., one-time speaker of the United States House of Representatives (1977 – 1987), coined the phrase “All politics is local.”, underscoring the fact that even national politics must reflect local priorities.

My friend and colleague, Lekan Sote, in his March 6, 2019 column in The PUNCH, also explored this theme when he posited that “politicians must always pay attention to the everyday concerns of their constituents, and not only the so-called national issues.”

I know it can be argued that Dele’s ministerial appointment had nothing to do with his state of origin.

Yes, he could still have been a Minister anyway, regardless of his state of origin – or even if he is stateless! All the same, we will still trace him to Ikoro-Ekiti, just like I did at the beginning of this piece – whether he likes it or not.

Can anyone turn Dele away from Ekiti? Felix Houphouet-Boigny, erstwhile president of the Ivory Coast (Cote d’Ivoire) says, “Home is where, when you go there, they take you in” Can they ever fail to welcome Dele anytime he goes to Ekiti?

That said, it will be uncharitable not to imagine the pressure under which Dele must be performing his duty as minister.

I think I read in a place where Dele reportedly said he specifically asked for the Solid Minerals portfolio. So, he has no choice but to perform.

Besides, he is a well-known associate of Mr. President; so he cannot afford to let him down. Therefore, the pressure on him to perform must be much.

The target and mandate set for him by his principal must be his driving force.

That, in itself, will demand a lot of personal sacrifice. There is no way Dele’s uncommon devotion to his national assignment, attested to by this editorial, will not cut him off even from childhood friends who shared the same lockers with him in elementary school!

Walking this tight rope in the midst of the realization that, all said and done, “Ile l’abo simi oko” cannot come easy. Abuja, Lagos or anywhere else is “oko” (foreign land) while Ekiti is “ile” (home).

Also read: Even Tinubu is not sure if Wale Edun resigned or was sacked

After a life well spent traversing here and there before transiting in 1984, Pa Alake’s mortal remains were interred in Ekiti where, from the stories I heard, he was well received. That, in itself, is instructive!

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Opinion

Tegbe’s 24-Hour Energy Zones and the Shift From Megawatts to Money

Published

6 days ago

October 2, 2026

Mariam Balogun

By Sufuyan Ojeifo,

There is a point at which a country’s electricity problem ceases to be merely an electricity problem. It becomes a problem of economic geography.

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Where can factories operate with confidence? Where can businesses plan beyond the next appearance of a generator? Where can hospitals, schools, technology companies, markets and households begin to organise their lives around the reasonable expectation that electricity will be there?

This is the thinking behind the latest initiative from the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, to develop what the Federal Government calls Energy Zones – defined corridors where homes, businesses and industries could receive stable, 24-hour electricity.

The proposed zones cover the Lagos axis, the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor and the Enugu-Port Harcourt corridor. Tegbe’s latest move is a meeting with selected electricity distribution companies to begin working through what it would take to make the idea real.

At first glance, it sounds like another promise of uninterrupted electricity in a country that has heard too many such promises. However, there is something more consequential in the architecture of the proposal.

Tegbe is asking Nigerians to look at the power problem differently.

For years, the national conversation has been dominated by generation. How many megawatts are being produced? How much can the transmission grid carry? How many generating plants are working? These are important questions. But electricity does not become useful simply because it has been generated.

It must travel. It must be received. It must be distributed. And ultimately, somebody must be able to use it. That last part has often been treated as the end of the conversation when, in reality, it is where the economic value of electricity begins.

Tegbe has put the point plainly. The constraint is not limited to generation and transmission; it also includes how much electricity can be taken up and delivered at the distribution end.

The proposed Energy Zones are intended to address precisely that gap while improving commercial demand and the revenue performance of the distribution companies.

There is an important idea here.

Nigeria does not necessarily have to wait for every weakness in the electricity value chain to be solved simultaneously before beginning to create pockets of reliability.

A country of more than 200 million people, with enormous differences in industrial activity, population density and commercial demand, may have to proceed through carefully selected economic corridors while the wider system is repaired.

This is not an argument for abandoning the national grid. It is an argument for making the grid more economically purposeful.

The three corridors selected by the Ministry are revealing. Lagos and its adjoining industrial axis represent perhaps the country’s most concentrated commercial and industrial demand.

The Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor connects the political capital with major commercial and industrial centres in the North. Enugu-Port Harcourt links important commercial, manufacturing and energy-producing communities in the South-East and South-South.

These are not simply lines on a power map. They are lines on Nigeria’s economic map. That distinction matters.

For too long, Nigerians have experienced electricity largely as a household inconvenience. The light goes off. The generator comes on. A business buys diesel. A manufacturer factors self-generation into production costs. A hospital makes contingency arrangements.

A young entrepreneur learns, often painfully, that the real price of electricity is not what appears on the bill but what it costs to keep the business alive when the supply fails.

A reliable electricity corridor changes that equation.

If a factory knows that a particular industrial cluster has dependable power, investment decisions begin to change.

If a commercial district can plan around predictable electricity, operating costs become easier to manage.

If businesses can depend on supply for most of the day, generators can move from being the first line of defence to being what they were always supposed to be: backup.

This is where Tegbe’s technocratic instincts may prove significant.

His background is not that of a career power-sector operator. His professional experience has largely been in consulting, fiscal and economic reform, institutional transformation and advisory work. That background has been visible in his early approach to the ministry – diagnosis, audits, financial questions, infrastructure bottlenecks, and attempts to identify where one part of the system is preventing another from functioning properly.

His Energy Zones proposal fits that pattern. It treats the electricity market less as a single machine waiting for one dramatic repair and more as a system of interconnected constraints that can be isolated, diagnosed and addressed.

Tegbe had already identified the three corridors as priorities for grid stabilisation, with technical audits intended to establish the condition of critical infrastructure. The latest engagement with DisCos suggests that the idea is now moving beyond technical diagnosis towards the more difficult question of how distribution will work within those corridors.

That is where the hard work begins.

A 24-hour power zone cannot be created by a press statement. It requires generation that is available when needed, transmission capacity that can carry it, distribution infrastructure capable of receiving it, transformers and feeders that can withstand the load, metering that properly captures consumption, customers willing and able to pay, and a commercial structure in which the various participants have an incentive to keep the system working.

It also requires protection. Vandalism and energy theft do not respect administrative boundaries. Neither do faulty equipment, unpaid bills or poor collection practices. Tegbe himself has acknowledged that the sector’s problems reinforce one another. Weak collections affect the market. Market weakness affects maintenance and gas payments. Unreliable supply in turn depresses collections.

This is why the Energy Zone experiment, if it is to succeed, must be judged by more than the number of hours electricity is available.

The real test will be whether reliability begins to produce economic consequences. Does industrial output increase? Do businesses spend less on self-generation? Does investment respond? Do DisCos collect more because customers are receiving a service they can trust? Does the government recover enough value from improved commercial activity to justify further infrastructure investment?

Those are the questions that should eventually accompany the glossy language of 24-hour power.

And there is another question that Tegbe and the Federal Government will have to confront: what happens outside the zones?

Nigeria cannot become a collection of electrically privileged corridors surrounded by communities waiting indefinitely for their turn.

The logic of concentrating investment in high-demand areas can be defended economically, especially if the resulting commercial activity strengthens the wider electricity market.

But the strategy will ultimately have to demonstrate how successful zones become stepping stones towards broader reliability.

That is the difference between an experiment and a system.

There is also a danger in admiring the architecture of reform from the comfort of an office.

It has to be said here that the statement issued by the minister’s media aide was long on ambition and conspicuously short on the details that matter. No timeline. No capacity targets. No specific investment figures. It is the kind of announcement that has, historically, been the precursor to nothing at all.

So Nigerians should watch the idea with interest, but also with the healthy scepticism that comes from decades of promises about electricity.

The minister deserves a measure of credit for at least diagnosing an important part of the illness.

For once, the conversation has shifted from the head to the feet – from generation to distribution, from megawatts to money.

At the same time, the Nigerian people have been given blueprints before. They have learned to admire the drawings while the building crumbles.

The Energy Zones remain a proposal. The government has not yet announced the detailed capacity requirements, implementation timetable or precise infrastructure investments that would make 24-hour supply possible.

That is not necessarily a fatal flaw. It may simply mean the idea is still being worked out.

But it does mean that the language of 24-hour power should be treated as an aspiration until it is matched by the machinery of implementation.

Yet the proposal deserves attention because it reflects a potentially important shift in the way the power problem is being conceived.

Nigeria may not fix its electricity crisis in one heroic sweep. It may have to build reliability corridor by corridor, demand centre by demand centre, and economic cluster by economic cluster.

There is nothing inherently glamorous about such work. It is engineering, finance, regulation, distribution and relentless attention to the weak link in the chain. But perhaps that is precisely the point.

The country has spent decades waiting for the great national electricity breakthrough.

Tegbe’s emerging approach suggests something less dramatic and potentially more practical: make a few economically critical parts of the system work properly, learn from them, strengthen the model, and expand it.

The success of that approach will ultimately be measured not in speeches or megawatts, but in what Nigerians can do with the electricity when it arrives.

Does the factory run a second shift? Does the business hire more workers? Does the hospital keep its equipment running through the night? Does the young entrepreneur stop budgeting for diesel and start budgeting for growth?

Also read: Everton Celebrates Nigeria’s 66th Independence With Football Legends

That is where the real power story begins. And that is the standard against which Tegbe’s Energy Zones should ultimately be judged: not by whether 24-hour power sounds impressive in a press release, but by whether the lights stay on long enough for Nigerians to build something with them.