Olokola: The Coastline we Celebrated Ourselves out of

Olusola Aderinsola

There is a particular danger in good news that nobody has bothered to question, and Ondo State may be living through one of those moments right now. When word spread of renewed investment interest from the Dangote Group in Olokola, the reaction across the State was instant and almost unanimous. Commentators praised it. Political actors rushed to attach themselves to it. What got lost in the celebration was a basic question that should have come first. What exactly are we celebrating, and what might it be costing us.

For as long as many residents can remember, Olokola has been spoken of as the State’s coastal jewel, a seventy five kilometre stretch of shoreline with the kind of potential most states would envy. Industry, trade, tourism, energy and logistics are all theoretically possible on that land. Yet a closer look at how that coastline has actually been allocated tells a far less comfortable story than the press releases suggest.

Out of roughly eleven thousand hectares of prime coastal land along the State’s entire coastline, more than ten thousand hectares is reportedly already locked into legacy contractual arrangements dating back to the Olokola Free Trade Zone agreements signed under the Agagu administration, over two decades ago. That is not a minor detail buried in fine print. It amounts to almost the whole of the State’s coast, committed under terms negotiated by people long out of office, under economic assumptions that no longer hold, with consequences the present generation is only beginning to grapple with.

It would be unfair to lay this entirely at the feet of the current administration, which did not create the arrangement and inherited it instead. But inheriting a problem is not the same as confronting it, and silence in the face of an inherited mistake eventually becomes a choice of its own.

That raises the questions this piece is built around. How did a single industrial interest come to hold effective control over almost the entire most valuable coastal corridor in the State. Who approved that level of concentration, and on what basis. Was any consideration given, then or now, to everyone who is not Dangote. And what happens to the people who already live on that land, many on swamp and waterlogged terrain with nowhere else to go, while their coastline is parcelled out around them in deals they were never consulted on.

This is not an argument against Dangote, and it should not be mistaken for one. Large industrial investment is not the enemy here. The company did not write the original agreements, and there is nothing dishonest about an investor taking up terms it was legitimately offered. If there is a failure, it belongs to those who structured the deal in the first place, and to everyone since who has had the opportunity to revisit it and chosen not to.

There is also a familiar trap worth naming directly. Questioning an arrangement like this is often branded as anti investment, or unpatriotic, or ungrateful, language typically used to discourage exactly the kind of scrutiny that protects ordinary citizens from decisions made on their behalf without their knowledge. Wanting investment and wanting accountability are not opposing positions. A State can hold both at once.

A serious coastal economy is rarely built around a single tenant. It tends to be built in layers, with industry sitting alongside logistics, tourism, residential growth, education, research, and the smaller businesses that grow in the shadow of bigger ones. When nearly every usable hectare is signed away to one player, none of that layered growth has room to exist. There is no space for a hotel developer willing to take a chance on Olokola, no space for a local entrepreneur to build a logistics operation nearby, and no space for communities to expand on their own ancestral land. What looks like development risks becoming, in practice, the trade of an entire coastline for a single tenant.

For a State with Ondo’s coastal advantage, that is a difficult outcome to call good enough, both for the people currently in office and for the generations who will inherit this decision long after today’s excitement has faded.

What follows from this is a short list of demands that are less about confrontation than about basic transparency. The Ondo State Government should open the terms of this arrangement to public scrutiny, not through selectively fed talking points to journalists, but directly to the people of the State who have a right to know what was signed away and on what terms. There should be an honest accounting of how much of the coastline remains genuinely available for anything other than Dangote’s industrial use. And there should be a clear answer on whether renegotiation is even possible at this stage, with a clear explanation if it is not, and a clear account of who made that determination.

None of this is a request for charity from Dangote. It is a request that government remember whose land this actually is, and act accordingly.

Olokola will outlive every official currently in office, and it will outlive this current wave of excitement too. What will not outlive any of it are the consequences of getting this wrong, consequences that today’s children and grandchildren will be left to live with long after the press releases have been forgotten. Better to ask these questions now, while there is still time to act on the answers, than to discover in twenty years that a generation celebrated its way into giving away the one thing it could never get back.