Ekiti is 30: From Fountain of Knowledge to Destination of Opportunities

From a land of farms and civil servants to a destination for travellers, researchers and investors, Ekiti turns 30 with its head high and its doors wide open for opportunities. Raheem Akingbolu reports.

Thirty years ago, it had no oil. No seaport. No metropolis. It had teachers. Farmers. And an unshakable belief that knowledge was enough. Today, planes are landing where dreams once took off. The land that helped teach Nigeria is building a home for its own. Ekiti is 30, and the world is coming.

There is music in Ekiti this October. It is in the drums, in the church choirs and in the buzz of Ado-Ekiti’s streets. It is in the sound of arrival, in aircraft touching down at the Ekiti Agro-Allied International Cargo Airport, visitors making their way to the warm and cold springs of Ikogosi, and researchers working in a new centre devoted to newborn health. It is also in the quiet confidence of a people looking at their state and recognising something they have waited years to see: movement.

From the market woman to the professor, from the farmer to the civil servant, the celebration carries one unmistakable message. Ekiti is 30, and there is much to celebrate.

When Ekiti was created on October 1, 1996 from the old Ondo State, its birth was the culmination of years of agitation by traditional rulers, academics, professionals, community leaders and political actors who sought a state that would bring government closer to the people and give the predominantly Ekiti-speaking communities greater recognition and influence. It was not simply a demand for another boundary on the Nigerian map. It was an argument about identity, belonging and the right to determine the direction of one’s own development.

There is a remarkable symmetry in the fact that Biodun Oyebanji, who today occupies Government House in Ado-Ekiti, was himself part of that historic journey. As secretary of the committee chaired by Chief Deji Fasuan that worked for the creation of Ekiti State, he belonged to a generation that helped articulate the case for statehood. Nearly three decades later, he is presiding over another chapter in its evolution. The story, however, is larger than any individual governor. It belongs to the generations that carried the idea before the state existed and to those now giving physical form to its ambitions.

For much of its early history, Ekiti was described in simple terms: a land of farms, schools and civil servants. Yet simplicity of description often concealed complexity of character. This was a society that produced doctors, professors, lawyers, engineers, journalists, teachers, administrators and scholars in remarkable numbers. Its reputation as the Fountain of Knowledge was not manufactured by public relations. It was earned in classrooms, lecture theatres, hospitals, courtrooms, newsrooms and professional institutions across Nigeria and beyond.

Yet there was a paradox at the heart of that achievement. Ekiti produced people whose education gave them the confidence to compete anywhere, but the state often lacked the economic infrastructure to retain enough of them. Its brightest sons and daughters travelled to Lagos, Ibadan, Abuja and eventually London, New York and other cities in search of opportunity. The state supplied talent to the wider economy while frequently struggling to build an economy capable of absorbing the talent it produced.

Today, another chapter is taking shape. The difference is increasingly visible in transport, connectivity, knowledge infrastructure, healthcare, agriculture and tourism. These developments do not erase the work still required, but they suggest that Ekiti’s longstanding assets are beginning to connect in ways that could give the state a stronger economic identity.

The most dramatic symbol of that change may be the airport. On December 10, 2025, the Ekiti Agro-Allied International Cargo Airport received its first commercial flight, operated by United Nigeria Airlines from Lagos. The state government reported that more than N49.7 billion had been expended directly on the project. The inaugural occasion brought together political figures from different administrations, including four former governors, with three of them travelling on the maiden flight.

An airport, of course, is not development by itself. Its real value will be measured by what moves through it and what follows it. Can agricultural produce reach markets faster? Can investors travel more easily? Can tourism become a more serious economic proposition? Can manufacturers and agro-processors reduce the distance between production and customers? Can professionals who once considered Ekiti too remote for regular business begin to see Ado-Ekiti differently?

Those are the questions that will ultimately determine the economic meaning of the runway.

For the Ekiti professional living outside the state, however, the symbolism is already powerful. A consultant who once calculated the time and cost of travelling by road can now imagine flying in for a meeting. An entrepreneur can think differently about moving goods. A researcher can consider a project that requires regular movement between Ekiti and other parts of Nigeria. A member of the diaspora can begin to see home not merely as somewhere to visit during Christmas, but as somewhere to build.

Perhaps even more significant than the aircraft was the political picture around it. Former governors who once occupied the same office at different times stood together at an event celebrating a project that had passed through several administrations. Governor Oyebanji publicly acknowledged the contributions of his predecessors, including Kayode Fayemi, who laid the foundation and advanced the airport project significantly. The gesture reinforced the idea that public development is often a relay, with successive administrations contributing to projects whose benefits ultimately belong to the people.

It was an unusually powerful picture for a state whose political history has known intense competition. In Ikogosi, the warm and cold springs eventually flow together, each retaining its character while becoming part of the same stream. There is something instructive in that natural phenomenon. Political differences need not become permanent divisions, particularly when the object of public service is larger than the interests of any administration.

Development, after all, is a relay. One administration starts something, another improves it, another completes it and the public inherits the result. The airport itself tells that story. Its journey involved successive administrations, federal intervention, private and institutional support, and years of political and technical effort before commercial operations finally began. That history is important because it changes the language of development from ownership to continuity.

The same principle is visible on the roads. The state government says the Oyebanji administration has constructed more than 285 kilometres of inter-city and intra-city roads, including a 1.2-kilometre flyover, while another 135 kilometres of rural roads have been delivered through the Rural Access and Agricultural Marketing Project, or RAAMP. President Bola Tinubu also approved the reconstruction of the Ado-Ijan-Ilumoba-Ikole Road through the Federal Government’s Renewed Hope Infrastructure Project Fund.

That corridor matters because it connects Ado-Ekiti with institutions and economic assets that increasingly define the state’s emerging development geography, including Agbeyewa Farms, the largest cassava farm in the world, Afe Babalola University, the Federal Polytechnic, the airport, the Ekiti Knowledge Zone and the Federal Institute of Transport Technology. In a developing economy, a road is more than asphalt. It is a line connecting a farmer to a buyer, a student to an institution, a patient to a hospital, an entrepreneur to a market and an investor to a location.

And then there is the idea that may eventually give Ekiti its most distinctive economic identity: the Ekiti Knowledge Zone. When its foundation was laid in 2026, the project was presented as a future hub for innovation, research and skills development. The state says the first phase is projected to create more than 20,000 jobs, while the full development could generate about 100,000 jobs across research, science, technology, industry and education.

These are projections, not jobs already delivered, but they reveal the scale of the ambition.

For decades, “Fountain of Knowledge” described what Ekiti people were. The Knowledge Zone asks a more demanding question: what can that knowledge produce?

That question goes to the heart of Ekiti’s future. The state already possesses a deep reservoir of educated people. What it increasingly needs is an ecosystem capable of turning education into intellectual property, research into enterprise, skills into employment and ideas into companies. If laboratories, technology firms, universities, investors, training institutions and entrepreneurs can operate within the same environment, the old reputation for knowledge could acquire an entirely new meaning.

The development of the Centre for Newborn Health Research and Innovation at Ekiti State University Teaching Hospital adds another dimension to that story. Commissioned in 2026, the centre is described by the state government as Nigeria’s first facility focusing solely on newborn health. Its mandate includes research, innovation, capacity building and clinical excellence in newborn care.

Its importance extends beyond the walls of a hospital. For years, Ekiti’s human capital travelled elsewhere because that was where specialised institutions, equipment, funding and opportunities were concentrated. The emergence of institutions designed to conduct specialised research and build professional capacity at home offers another possibility: that expertise can increasingly find an institutional home within the state itself.

The same argument applies to agriculture. Ekiti’s farming tradition is older than the state itself, but the modern economic question is no longer simply how much the land can produce. It is how much value can be created around what the land produces. Processing, packaging, storage, transportation, market access and technology are the difference between agriculture as subsistence and agriculture as enterprise. Programmes encouraging young people into commercial farming reflect an effort to make agriculture part of that new economic equation.

This is where the airport becomes more than an airport, the roads more than roads, and the Knowledge Zone more than another construction project. Each becomes part of a larger chain. A farmer needs a road. A processor needs logistics. An exporter needs market access. A researcher needs an institution. An investor needs connectivity. A tourist needs transport and accommodation. A young graduate needs an ecosystem in which education can become a livelihood.

Ekiti’s natural attractions add another layer. The warm and cold springs of Ikogosi have always offered the state something that cannot be manufactured in a laboratory or reproduced by policy. What has often been missing is the scale of infrastructure, marketing, hospitality investment and connectivity required to convert natural attraction into sustained economic value. With better access, the question becomes how deliberately the state and private sector can build a tourism economy around its landscapes, culture, festivals and hospitality.

That is why Ekiti at 30 is about more than age. Thirty is an occasion to look backward with gratitude, but it is also an appropriate moment to ask what comes next. The state has accumulated advantages over three decades: an educated population, respected institutions, agricultural potential, cultural depth, natural attractions and a growing network of infrastructure. The task ahead is to make those advantages reinforce one another.

For Oyebanji, the significance of this moment is also personal and historical. He belongs to the generation that argued for Ekiti’s creation and now leads it at a point when some of the ambitions associated with that creation are becoming physical realities. The airport, the roads, the Knowledge Zone and the newborn research centre are not the work of one man or one administration, and the governor’s acknowledgement of earlier contributions has underscored that history.

That is perhaps the more consequential political story in Ekiti today: not that competition has disappeared, but that the language of continuity has become increasingly visible around projects whose gestation extends beyond a single tenure. The presence of former governors at the airport offered a striking public image of that continuity. Whether such accommodation becomes a durable institutional culture will depend on what future administrations choose to preserve, improve and complete.

The next decade will therefore test the foundations now being laid. The true measure of the airport will be the businesses it helps move. The true measure of the roads will be the economic activity they unlock. The true measure of the Knowledge Zone will be the researchers, companies, technologies and jobs it eventually produces. The true measure of agricultural policy will be whether farmers earn more from organised value chains. And the true measure of political continuity will be whether successive administrations can inherit projects without inheriting the instinct to start everything afresh.

That is the unfinished promise of Ekiti at 30, and the opportunity before the state now is to build on these foundations until knowledge, infrastructure and enterprise translate into lasting prosperity for its people.

Thirty years ago, Ekiti entered the federation with knowledge as its inheritance and determination as its currency. It now stands at a different threshold, with an airport linking it to the wider economy, roads opening new corridors, a Knowledge Zone seeking to turn intellectual capital into enterprise, a specialised health research centre expanding the boundaries of local expertise, agriculture looking towards value creation and tourism waiting for a larger audience.

So let the drums beat and the choirs sing. Let Government House and the village square keep the same rhythm. Let the farmer look towards a wider market, the researcher towards a better laboratory, the entrepreneur towards a new customer and the young graduate towards a future that does not necessarily require departure.

The Fountain of Knowledge has always had something to say. At 30, Ekiti is building the roads, institutions and connections that may finally allow the world to hear it more clearly.

Ekiti is 30. Truly, there is much to celebrate.

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