Former governor of the old Western Region, General Adeyinka Adebayo (rtd) is dead.
Details are sketchyas to the circumstances of his demise at the time of this report.
Adebayo was born in 1928 in the present-day Ekiti state and joined the West African Frontier Force in 1948 as a regiment signaler.
He later reportedly completed the Officer Cadet Training Course in Teshie, Ghana from 1950 to 1952 and after passing the War Office Examination for Commonwealth cadets in 1952 and the West African qualifying examination in 1953, he was commissioned as an officer in the Royal West African Frontier Force (RWAFF) as the 23rd West African military officer with number WA23 and 7th Nigerian military officer with number N7.
Reports say that Adebayo also attended the Staff College course in Camberley (Surrey) in 1960 and the prestigious Imperial Defence College, London in late 1965 where he was the only African officer.
Hewas constantly commended for promoting agricultural extension services and for establishing the Institute of Agricultural Research and Training, Moor Plantation, Ibadan as governor of the western region.
He was also known to have rejected the use of force resolving the Biafran crisis.
He was quoted as saying: “I need not tell you what horror, what devastation and what extreme human suffering will attend the use of force. When it is all over and the smoke and dust have lifted, and the dead are buried, we shall find, as other people have found, that it has all been futile, entirely futile, in solving the problems we set out to solve.”
When the civil war began in Nigeria, Adebayo as governor of the western ordered that all the bridges into his region should be demolished so as to prevent the Biafran army from reaching Lagos through Ondo and other neighbouring areas.
He later became the chairman of the committee on the reconciliation and integration of the Igbos (Biafrans) back into the Nigerian fold.
Before his death, he was chairman of the Yoruba Council of Elders.
His eldest son Otunba Niyi Adebayo was a governor of Ekiti State in Nigeria from 1999 to 2003. Another son, Adesola Adebayo was the Commissioner for Works and Transport, Ekiti state in the Dr Kayode Fayemi led administration from 2010 to 2014.
