A former senator and ex-governor of Kwara State, Cornelius Olatunji Adebayo, has died at age 84.
Naijaonpoint learnt that family sources who confirmed Adebayo’s death to the Cable said the ex-governor died early on Wednesday morning in Abuja.
The deceased was born on February 24, 1941, in Igbaja community of Kwara and became the governor of the state in 1983.
He served as Minister of Communications from 2003 to 2006 and was elected a senator on the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) platform in 1979.
Adebayo was a member of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) as pro-democracy activists sought to reclaim the mandate handed to MKO Abiola in the June 12, 1993, presidential election.
In 1993, Adebayo was offered a ministerial position in the Sani Abacha junta but declined.
On May 31, 1995, the police arrested and grilled Adebayo and other members of NADECO over a bomb that exploded in Ilorin, the Kwara capital.
He fled the country in 1996 for a brief exile in Canada as the junta reportedly closed in on him for a second time.
Adebayo is credited with a slew of education reforms in Kwara as the state’s education commissioner from 1975 to 1978.
In other news, the suspected killer of Hafsoh Lawal, a final-year student of Kwara State College of Education, Ilorin, Abdulrahman Bello, confessed in court on Wednesday to killing his Facebook lover for money rituals.
Naijaonpoint reports that Bello, who also claims to be an Islamic cleric, told the court that he committed the act alone. He explained that he killed Lawal because he needed human hands for money rituals.
However, he expressed regret, stating that if he had known another way to obtain the necessary ritual ingredients, he would not have taken her life.
The court also heard from a police witness, Inspector Ayodele Azeez, attached to the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) of the state police command.