SALUTE TO A RARE PARTY BUILDER:
SPN Olambe Holds Memorial for Mr Gbolahan
On June 6, 2026, members of the Socialist Party of Nigeria (SPN) Olambe Ifo Ogun State held a political memorial to mark the first anniversary of the passing of Gbolahan Festus Togunbo, the branch chairman. Mr. Gbolahan, as he was fondly called, passed away on May 14, 2025 at the age of 51 after a brief illness.
His life serves as a testament to the endless possibilities that are posed when radical and socialist ideas take root among the broad masses. 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. Yet he immensely contributed to how the community, which is without any good roads and basic public infrastructures, became the epicenter of the building of the SPN and its electrifying campaign during the 2019 general elections.
The 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.
After becoming a member in 2018, 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. 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’
Later 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 with Hassan Taiwo Soweto, a leading member of the DSM, as the party candidate for Ogun State House of Assembly in the Ifo constituency.
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 is not an idea that the formally ‘uneducated’ broad masses cannot understand or embrace.
Expectedly, the undemocratic deregistration of the party by the electoral body after the 2019 elections means that the branch like others elsewhere is not active as it used to be. However, at the memorial, the reminiscences of the role of Mr. Gbolohan and other party members in the building of a party of the poor, which was not only for election contests but also involved in various campaigns and struggles challenging the government over the poor state of the community, inspired members to agreeing to begin to hold meeting and activities regularly again.