The election was over, but Dipo Dina was not ready to accept the result.
On 14 April 2007, voters in Ogun State went to the polls to choose their governor. When the results were announced, the incumbent, Otunba Gbenga Daniel of the Peoples Democratic Party, had won a second term with 426,132 votes. Senator Ibikunle Amosun of the All Nigeria Peoples Party came second with 135,149 votes.
Dipo Dina, the Action Congress candidate, came third with 79,915 votes.
For Dina, however, the numbers did not settle the matter.
He challenged the election at the tribunal, alleging that the poll had been affected by rigging, violence and other irregularities. His petition did not succeed. A substantial part of it was struck out, and he subsequently lost his appeal at the Court of Appeal.
Three years later, on 25 January 2010, Dina was shot dead in Ota, Ogun State.
The murder would eventually dominate the story of his life. But long before the bullets, there had been a political struggle. Dina had spent years positioning himself as an outspoken critic of the Ogun State government, building a political movement, publishing allegations about the administration and preparing for an election in which he believed he could take control of the state.
His 2007 election challenge was therefore more than a failed petition. It was one of the most revealing episodes in the political career of a man whose name would later become permanently associated with one of Ogun State’s unresolved political killings.
Before the Ballot, Dina Had Already Chosen His Battlefield
EXPLORE NOW: Biographies & Cultural Icons of Nigeria
Dipo Dina was not a career politician who suddenly appeared during the 2007 election.
A trained accountant and businessman from Ijebu Ode, he had entered active politics earlier in the Fourth Republic. In 2003, he contested the Ijebu Central Federal Constituency seat under the Alliance for Democracy.
His political ambitions eventually moved beyond the National Assembly.
By the middle of the decade, Dina had become increasingly prominent in Ogun State politics and had established the Dipo Dina Movement, a political organisation that became closely associated with his criticism of Governor Gbenga Daniel’s administration.
The movement did something unusual for a political organisation of its time. It used newspaper advertising as a major weapon.
It published a series titled “Otunba Gbenga Daniel Administration in Ogun State: An Assessment”, in which it scrutinised the government’s spending, projects and financial affairs.
The publications were not neutral government audits. They represented the position of Dina and his supporters, who were attempting to build a political case against the incumbent administration.
The Daniel government disputed the allegations.
That distinction is important because the political language of the period was often fierce. Claims made by one side were immediately challenged by the other, and campaign material could easily become part of the larger political struggle.
Yet the publications reveal something significant about Dina’s political strategy.
He was not waiting for election season to introduce himself to voters.
He was campaigning long before election day.
The Newspaper War With Gbenga Daniel
By 2006, the confrontation had become particularly intense.
The Dipo Dina Movement published repeated criticisms of the Daniel administration in national newspapers. One of its publications described the government as a “propaganda government” and questioned its management of Ogun State’s resources.
The movement also announced that it had prepared a political blueprint for an Action Congress government under Dina.
The message was clear.
Dina was not merely criticising Daniel because he wanted attention. He was presenting himself as an alternative.
The political confrontation eventually reached the courts in another form. The state government obtained an injunction restraining the Dipo Dina Movement and a national newspaper from further publishing material relating to the state’s finances. Dina was subsequently prosecuted but was discharged and acquitted.
By then, the relationship between the two men had become one of the defining political conflicts in Ogun State.
Daniel controlled the machinery of government.
Dina was building an opposition platform outside it.
The 2007 election would determine whether the latter could become the former.
How Dina Emerged as the Action Congress Candidate
The Action Congress primary was itself a contest.
According to contemporary reporting, Dina defeated five other aspirants to secure the party’s ticket for the 2007 Ogun governorship election.
It was a significant achievement.
The party was placing its governorship campaign in the hands of a politician who had already spent years attacking the ruling administration.
Dina’s campaign also reflected the public image he had cultivated.
He was presented as a businessman who was willing to spend his own resources on political and social causes. Reports from the period associated him with educational assistance, including bursaries and the distribution of exercise books.
His political movement also used the slogan “DD Direct”.
The campaign was therefore not simply about defeating Daniel.
It was an attempt to turn Dina’s personal reputation, political organisation and opposition message into an electoral movement across Ogun State.
But there was a problem that would become crucial on election day.
Dina was not the only major opponent of Daniel.
The Opposition Was Split
Ibikunle Amosun was also contesting the governorship.
Amosun, then a senator, was the candidate of the All Nigeria Peoples Party.
This meant that the anti-Daniel vote was divided between two significant opposition candidates.
There were also other candidates in the race, including Alhaji Sefiu Adegbenga Kaka of the Democratic Peoples Party.
The political arithmetic was therefore more complicated than a simple contest between Daniel and Dina.
The incumbent was seeking another term.
Dina was running on the Action Congress platform.
Amosun was campaigning under the ANPP.
Each opposition candidate had his own political network and supporters.
When the votes were eventually counted, Daniel had secured a commanding lead.
He received 426,132 votes.
Amosun received 135,149.
Dina received 79,915.
The result placed Dina a distant third.
But the election was not finished for him.
Dina Refused to Leave the Election at the Polling Station
Dina challenged Daniel’s victory before the Ogun State Governorship and Legislative Houses Election Petition Tribunal.
His petition alleged that the election was affected by serious irregularities, including rigging and violence.
Contemporary reports stated that a substantial part of his petition was struck out and that he lost at the tribunal.
He did not stop there.
Dina appealed to the Court of Appeal.
He lost again.
The courts therefore did not overturn Daniel’s victory, and the official result remained intact.
This became an important distinction in the later history of Dina’s political career.
He challenged the election.
He did not win the legal battle to have the result cancelled.
The difference is sometimes lost in later accounts of his life, particularly because his subsequent murder transformed the way people remembered the political disputes surrounding him.
Ogun Was Not the Only State Fighting Over the 2007 Results
Dina’s case was part of a much larger national story.
Nigeria’s 2007 general elections produced numerous election petitions across the country. Candidates who disputed results turned to election tribunals and the courts, producing years of litigation in several states.
In the South West, some of the most significant legal battles occurred in Ogun, Osun and Ekiti.
In Ogun, the election produced two major challengers to Daniel, Dina and Amosun.
In Osun, Action Congress candidate Rauf Aregbesola challenged the victory of Governor Olagunsoye Oyinlola.
In Ekiti, Action Congress candidate Kayode Fayemi challenged the election of Segun Oni.
The eventual outcomes differed from state to state. Some election disputes lasted for years, while others ended without the declared winner being removed.
Dina’s case belonged to this wider period when Nigerian elections were frequently followed by another contest inside the courtroom.
The ballot box was only the first stage.
The Court Case Did Not End Dina’s Political Opposition
Losing the petition did not make Dina disappear from Ogun politics.
He continued criticising Daniel’s administration.
This is one of the most important parts of the story because the years between the 2007 election and Dina’s death are sometimes compressed into a single sentence.
They were not politically quiet years.
Dina remained associated with the opposition and continued to use his movement and public statements to challenge the government.
Academic work on Ogun politics has also identified Dina as one of the prominent Action Congress critics of Daniel after the 2007 election.
The political relationship between the two camps therefore continued beyond the tribunal.
Dina had lost the election and the subsequent legal battle, but he had not abandoned his political opposition.
Then Came 2010
On 25 January 2010, Dipo Dina was killed in Ota.
Contemporary reports stated that he was attacked around the Covenant University area while travelling in his black Toyota Camry.
Two other people who were in the vehicle, his driver Tunde Oyediran and a prophetess identified as Funmi Olagoke, survived.
The immediate accounts of what happened were conflicting.
Associates of Dina described the incident as an assassination.
The Ogun State Police Commissioner initially disputed that interpretation and said it was not an assassination case.
Other reports described the attackers as suspected hired killers.
The investigation was subsequently taken over by the Assistant Inspector General of Police in charge of Zone II, reflecting the high profile of the killing.
The disagreement over what exactly happened became part of the tragedy.
So did the inevitable question of whether Dina’s political activities had anything to do with his death.
But the existence of a political conflict is not, by itself, proof of a political motive for a murder.
That distinction remains essential to the historical record.
The Political Story Behind the Name
Dipo Dina’s political importance did not begin on the night he was killed.
By then, he had already spent years constructing a public identity.
He had contested an election in 2003.
He had established a political movement.
He had published repeated criticisms of the Ogun State government.
He had survived a legal battle over some of those publications.
He had defeated five other aspirants to secure the Action Congress governorship ticket.
He had contested the 2007 governorship election against a sitting governor and another prominent opposition candidate.
He had challenged the result before the tribunal.
He had lost at the tribunal and at the Court of Appeal.
And he had continued criticising the government afterwards.
These details matter because they place the 2010 murder within the full arc of his political life rather than treating his election challenge as an isolated event.
A Political Career Interrupted
There is also an irony in the political history that followed.
Ibikunle Amosun, the candidate who finished second to Daniel in the 2007 election, would later become one of the most powerful figures in Ogun State politics.
After moving into the Action Congress of Nigeria, Amosun contested the 2011 governorship election and defeated the PDP candidate, becoming governor of Ogun State.
Dina did not live to participate in that next electoral contest.
His death in January 2010 removed him from the political field before the 2011 election.
It is impossible to know what role he would have played had he survived. Any claim about what he would have achieved politically would be speculation.
What can be established is that the political landscape of Ogun changed considerably between the 2007 election and 2011, and Dina was absent from the contest because his life had been cut short.
The Election That Became Part of His Legacy
The 2007 election did not make Dipo Dina governor.
The tribunal did not overturn Daniel’s victory.
The Court of Appeal did not change the outcome.
Yet the election became an important part of Dina’s legacy because it revealed the political character he had developed before his death.
He was a businessman who entered politics and became an opposition campaigner.
He was a candidate who refused to treat defeat at the polls as the end of the political argument.
He was a critic who continued to confront the administration he had failed to unseat.
And he was a politician whose death three years later caused many Nigerians to look back at those earlier confrontations with renewed interest.
The temptation is to connect every political dispute that preceded a political killing to the killing itself.
History demands greater caution.
The evidence establishes that Dina and the Daniel administration were political opponents and that Dina challenged the 2007 election result. It also establishes that he continued to criticise the administration after losing his case.
What remains a separate question is whether those political conflicts had anything to do with his murder.
That question belongs to the history of his death.
But the story of the 2007 election belongs to the history of the politician he was before the murder.
And that story begins not with a gunshot, but with a candidate who looked at an election result, disagreed with it and took the fight to court.
EXPLORE NOW: Military Era & Coups in Nigeria
Author’s Note
Dipo Dina’s 2007 election challenge captures an important chapter in Ogun State’s Fourth Republic politics, from his long-running opposition to Governor Gbenga Daniel, through the divided opposition of the 2007 governorship contest, to his decision to challenge the result in court and continue his political criticism after the case failed. His murder in 2010 later cast a darker shadow over these earlier events, but the historical record requires the two stories to be kept distinct: Dina was unquestionably an outspoken political opponent of the government, but the circumstances and motive behind his killing must not be confused with the established facts of his election dispute.
References
Ayoade, John A. A., and Adeoye A. Akinsanya, editors. Nigeria’s Critical Elections, 2011. Lexington Books, 2012.
Dipo Dina Movement. Otunba Gbenga Daniel Administration in Ogun State: An Assessment. Newspaper publications, 2006.
Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa. The 2007 General Elections in Nigeria: The Independent National Electoral Commission as an Impartial Umpire. Journal of African Elections, 2007.
Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa. Public Perceptions of Judicial Decisions in Election Disputes: The Case of the 2007 General Election in Nigeria. Journal of African Elections, 2011.
Larewaju, Kolade. “Who Killed Dipo Dina?” Vanguard, 30 January 2010.
Larewaju, Kolade. “Dipo Dina: AIG Takes Over Investigation.” Vanguard, 27 January 2010.
The Nation. “Osoba, the ‘Recurrent Comeback Kid’ at 77.” The Nation.
