MR. GBOLAHAN – SALUTE TO A RARE PARTY BUILDER WHOSE COURAGE SHALL CONTINUE TO INSPIRE

GBOLAHAN FESTUS TOGUNBO (1974-2025)

On Thursday 14 May 2026, it would be one year since we lost to the grim reaper a rare and selfless builder of the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN). Mr. Gbolahan Festus Togunbo, the chairman of the SPN in Olambe, Ogun state, passed away last year at the age of 51 after a brief illness.

His life will continue to serve as a testament to the endless possibilities that is posed when radical and socialist ideas take root among the broad masses.

Mr. Gbolahan, as he was fondly called, was born in 1974 in Igbore, Abeokuta, Ogun state. Poorly educated and unable to find a good paying job, he mostly eked out a living working at construction sites and doing menial jobs around his neighborhood of Olambe – the sprawling working-class residential community on the borders of Lagos and Ogun state that would later become the epicenter of the building of the SPN and its electrifying campaign during the 2019 general elections.

The Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) had been launched in November 2013 by the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) and working-class activists. It was not until 2018, a year before the elections, that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) registered it after sustained legal and political campaign.

It was around 2016 that the idea first came to start the building of the party in the rugged terrains of Olambe after I moved there in December 2015. Neglected by the state government, the community was without any good roads and basic public infrastructures. People were just left to fend for themselves anyhow they could.

After we started the building, the party could only boast of two members in Olambe for several agonizing months – that is myself and the first recruit, Comrade Amuludun. Meetings then were no more than informal discussions between both of us often over a game of ludo. In those difficult months, we made enormous efforts, including occasional leafletting and paper sale, to popularize the ideas of struggle and Socialism in the community. But the results we wanted to see were not happening as quickly as we wanted.

Then a chance political discussion with Mr. Gbolahan transformed the situation. The day was a rainy day and as was often the case, the Olambe roads, footpaths mostly, became a temporary lagoon. Undeterred, I started the daily tortuous drive to the DSM Centre roughly 13 kilometers away in Lagos. A few minutes out, Mr. Gbolahan flagged me down and asked to hitch a ride. Prior to then, he was just a jolly happy fellow whom I saw around the neighborhood. By the end of a bumpy ride that lasted about 45 minutes, a political relationship that would transform Olambe had been forged.

As a man who lived in hardship, Mr. Gbolahan instinctively understood what the SPN is – a class party for the millions of toilers against the capitalist thieves and swindlers who have held the country to ransom. Furthermore, he recognized himself in the trilogy of SPN’s slogan: a Party of workers, the poor and youth. The chanting of this slogan at party meetings often gave him joy.

Having embraced the ideas, Mr. Gbolahan took up the task of spreading it to others. Hence after attending meetings a few times at the initial venue in comrade Amuludun’s house, he accepted a proposal to move subsequent meetings to the frontage of his house. That was the breakthrough we were looking for. From there on, the SPN grew in leaps and bounds.

In 2018, Mr. Gbolahan became the chairman of the party in the community. A few months after, he led the SPN into one of its most inspiring electoral campaigns in the 2019 general elections. On 15 December 2018 when the party launched its bid for a house of assembly seat in Ogun state, a crowd of community people including youths, women, elders, representatives of trade associations, okada riders’ associations filled the Olambe town hall. Here is how a report on the Socialist Party, England and Wales, website captured it: “120 people came to Hassan Taiwo Soweto’s election rally for Ogun State House of Assembly in the Ifo constituency on 15 December… A march and vehicle convoy followed the rally with people pasting up posters and leafleting passers-by”.

So electrifying was the campaign the party ran that the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) was in panic. Although the votes were eventually stolen, the campaign demonstrated the possibility of a pro-working people alternative political party to win elections. It also showed very clearly that Socialism isn’t an idea that the formally ‘uneducated’ broad masses cannot understand or embrace.

Mr. Gbolahan himself was not only poor; he was also poorly educated. He never made it beyond Primary 6 yet that did not stop him from embracing the ideas of Socialism in the simple way he understood it as an idea of change to liberate himself and poor people like him from a life of drudgery under capitalist bondage. And then he went ahead to spread it to others and in the language they understand.

Obviously, many comrades and party members contributed to the overall success of the SPN in Olambe but it is important to highlight the role played by Mr. Gbolahan and his ability to explain the ideas in simple terms and in his native Yoruba language. Most times he won converts to the party while cutting grass behind somebody’s house or running an errand. Before he was done with the job, he made sure to introduce the SPN to them and from there a political discussion starts.

His kind of job which often took him on foot daily around the community also transformed him into an itinerant party promoter of a sort. He never left his house in the morning without SPN leaflets written in English and Yoruba tucked inside his sack-carrier bag in between his cutlass and other tools.

It seems what worked for him most of the time was that people were often amazed that such a simple man was interested in politics at all. But that was the opportunity he needed to drive the point home and win their hearts. Mr. Gbolahan also had a way with people. Despite the innumerable difficulties he lived through, he was always full of life and never lost his sharp wit and humor.

In paying tribute to the life of this rare party builder and fighter for change, we have to recommit ourselves to continuing the path he toed: that of building a mass working class political party to take political power, smash capitalism and start the Socialist reconstruction of society.

H.T Soweto