On a Thursday in July, Dr Charles Akindiji “Diji” Akinola turned seventy. Most Nigerians only met him this year, as the newly appointed pioneer Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the South-West Development Commission (SWDC). But the man who now sits atop the region’s most ambitious institutional experiment did not arrive there by accident. His seventy years trace a long, deliberate arc: from a classroom at the University of Ibadan, through field offices across the Niger Delta and West Africa’s cocoa belt, into the seminar rooms of Harvard, Cambridge, Cranfield and MIT, and finally into the machinery of government in Osun State, Abuja, and now the Southwest. Along the way, he chaired the very technical committee that wrote the memorandum for the institution he now leads — a rare, almost poetic symmetry in Nigerian public life. To understand SWDC’s pioneer helmsman is to understand four decades of Nigeria’s development history told through one career.

1956-1980: ROOTS AND FORMATION

Born in July 1956, Akinola belongs to a generation of Nigerians whose education straddled the optimism of the early independence years and the harder economic realities that followed. He read Agriculture at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), a choice that placed him early within a discipline the Southwest has always treated as central to its development philosophy: the belief that the region’s prosperity begins on its farms. That undergraduate foundation would later deepen into a doctorate in Agricultural Extension from the University of Ibadan, and it explains why, whatever office Akinola has since occupied, planning commission, governor’s office, presidential villa, or regional commission, agriculture and rural livelihoods have never been far from his desk. It is a thread that runs unbroken from his earliest academic training through to the South-West Agriculture Platform he now champions at SWDC.

1984-1990: THE MAKING OF A SCHOLAR

Akinola’s first professional home was the lecture hall. Between 1984 and 1989, he taught agricultural extension education, comparative extension systems and extension strategies in pilot rural development projects at the University of Ibadan, training both undergraduate and postgraduate students. Alongside teaching, he conducted field research into how agricultural technologies and innovations spread among farmers, work that took him into seventy-two villages under the Funtua Agricultural Development Project in Northern Nigeria between 1984 and 1986, and into a parallel pilot project spanning thirty villages in South-West Nigeria between 1984 and 1990, research that, by his own later account, produced significant improvements in the socio-economic well-being of the rural communities involved. In 1990, he moved to Buea, Cameroon, as a Research and Training Fellow at the Pan-African Institute for Development (PAID) West Africa, where he trained and supervised development workers from across the continent in action-research programmes designed around community and regional-level development, and built training curricula in small and medium-scale enterprise development. It was a short stint — under a year — but it marked his transition from the classroom into the wider world of applied development practice, a shift he would never fully reverse.

1993-2009: THE DEVELOPMENT DECADES

The 1990s and 2000s were Akinola’s most prolific years as a development practitioner, and arguably the years in which his professional identity was forged. From 1993 to 1998, he served as Nigeria Country Director of TechnoServe, the US-based international development agency then operating in seventeen countries across Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe. As Country Director, he carried overall responsibility for the organisation’s Nigeria programme, managed its formal cooperation agreement with the Federal Government through the National Planning Commission and the Federal Ministry of Finance, and advised state and federal governments on the design and structure of international development cooperation agreements. He oversaw a technical assistance programme on micro-credit and enterprise development, built institutional capacity for community development associations, and helped establish the Community Development Micro-Finance Roundtable, with core funding from the Ford Foundation and USAID. He developed strategic alliances with UNICEF, the Canada Fund and the US Ambassador’s Self-Help Programme, contributed to UNDP’s strategic planning work on small and medium enterprise development and Women in Development, and represented Nigeria in the deliberations of the United States Government’s Advisory Committee on Voluntary Foreign Aid (ACVFA), a rare seat, for a Nigerian development professional of that era, at an instrument of American foreign-aid policy.

It was also during this period that Akinola co-convened, with the International Oil Industry Group, Nigeria’s first Oil Sector Community Development Roundtable, an early attempt to define new directions in sustainable development for host communities across the Niger Delta. In parallel, from 1993 to 2006, he served as a founding Trustee and Director of the Community Development Foundation (CDF), coordinating a technical team that built it into Nigeria’s largest private development finance institution for community projects.

When TechnoServe eventually wound down its Nigerian operations, Akinola did not let the institutional knowledge disappear. In 1999, he founded and became Executive Director of Enterprise for Development International (EfDI), a Lagos-based development consultancy that absorbed much of TechnoServe’s portfolio and became, by his own account, a market leader in Nigeria’s development sector for the following decade. Under EfDI, he coordinated community economic development assignments across Nigeria, expanded the organisation’s footprint in the Niger Delta, and advised leading oil and gas operators, Chevron, Shell Petroleum Development Company, Nigeria Agip Oil Company, Total, Oando, Brass LNG, BG, Afren and the West African Gas Pipeline Company, on Corporate Social Responsibility design and what practitioners in the sector call the “Social Licence to Operate.” He was particularly instrumental in shaping Chevron’s long-term stakeholder relations strategy in 2001 and the subsequent innovative community engagement and development strategy for the flagship Escravos Gas-to-Liquid project. Working across Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana with the West African Gas Pipeline Company, he helped design a New Community Engagement Strategy guided by the Global Memorandum of Understanding (GMoU) framework — subsequently adopted as the industry standard for community engagement by the joint ventures of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation and the international oil companies in the Niger Delta.

Between 2001 and 2005, he simultaneously served as National Coordinator of the Sustainable Tree Crop Program (STCP), a multi-agency, public-private partnership involving USAID and the worldwide chocolate industry, working to improve smallholder agricultural systems focused on cocoa and cashew across West Africa. Few Nigerian development professionals of that era carried as broad a portfolio at once, spanning microfinance, oil-sector community relations, and agricultural value chains, often in the same working year.

2005-2011: THE CROSS-SECTOR YEARS AND THE HARVARD SOJOURN

Even as his development-sector consultancy matured, Akinola kept building his own institutional and intellectual capacity. In 2005, he participated in the University of Cambridge’s programme on Cross-Sector Partnerships, and between 2008 and 2010 he served as a Founding Partner of Hybridea Partnership, a public-sector innovation and strategic management consultancy — the same firm to which he would return, as Principal Partner, more than a decade later. He also completed certificate courses in Enterprise Development and Management at Cranfield University, and in Negotiation, Mediation and Dispute Resolution at MIT.

The most consequential of these academic detours came in 2009, when Akinola was selected as an Edward S. Mason Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, pursuing a master’s degree in public policy and administration with a focus on technology, innovation and sustainability. His fellowship research, completed in December 2009, examined how to maximise the benefits of the then-nascent Lagos Mass Rail Transit system, focusing on the technological and institutional learning required for what were then still paper plans: the Red and Blue Line corridors. More than a decade before the Blue Line opened to passengers and the Red Line followed, Akinola’s Harvard research had already engaged with the institutional questions that would determine whether Lagos’s rail ambitions succeeded — work that anticipated, and arguably helped inform the policy environment around, the infrastructure Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu’s administration would eventually deliver to Lagosians. In May 2010, he turned his fellowship research toward a related question, studying innovation systems and education in agricultural transformation through the lens of Costa Rica’s Earth University.

Akinola stayed on at Harvard as a Fellow of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs (WCFIA) between 2010 and 2011, with a policy research focus on innovation for economic development and governance. He led a policy and strategy project aimed at leveraging Africa’s diaspora knowledge networks and talent to expand the space for innovation and international development cooperation. He remains today a member of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Dean’s Council, a mark of the university’s continued regard for a fellow who, unusually, took his research home and tried to build with it.

2011-2022: HOME TO OSUN

Akinola brought his Harvard training home to Osun State, where Governor Rauf Aregbesola’s administration was experimenting with new approaches to sub-national governance. He chaired the Osun State Planning Commission from 2011 to 2014, and concurrently served as Director-General of the Office of Economic Development and Partnerships (OEDP) from 2011 to 2018 — a strategic think-tank and policy-implementation agency domiciled directly in the Governor’s office. Under OEDP, he brokered partnerships between the state, national and international investors, conceptualised and initiated the Osun Rural Enterprise and Agriculture Programme (O-REAP) as a multi-ministerial collaboration using agriculture as the key driver of economic transformation, and led the documentation of Osun’s Social Protection Programme design and implementation, with support from the Ford Foundation and UNICEF, work later studied for replication at both state and federal levels across Nigeria.

It was also during this period that Akinola played a central role in the activities that led to the establishment of the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN) Commission, the regional think tank whose work would, years later, feed directly into the case for a statutory Southwest development body.

From 2018 to 2022, under Governor Adegboyega Oyetola, Akinola served as Chief of Staff, managing the daily operations of the Governor’s office, acting as confidant and adviser, and providing a sounding board across a wide range of issues. He oversaw the affairs of the state’s ministries, departments and agencies, mediated disputes among cabinet members, interfaced with the legislative and judicial arms of government, and worked with the Governor to negotiate the state’s new minimum wage for workers, while also undertaking what has been described as bold reforms to reposition the education sector.

It was in this capacity, as Chief of Staff, that the Southwest Governors’ Forum appointed him Chairman of the Technical Committee tasked with reviewing the South-West Development Commission Bill and aggregating the position of the six Southwest states into a joint memorandum, first to the Governors, and subsequently to the National Assembly. It was the document that laid the legal foundation for the institution he would later be chosen to lead.

2022-2026: THE SWDC YEARS

After leaving the Osun government in 2022, Akinola became Principal Partner at Hybridea Partnership once again, while founding, for a second time, in effect, Enterprise for Development International, now describing himself as Chairman of an international development agency with over twenty years of sustainable-development work across Nigeria and West Africa. His national profile grew further when he was appointed Senior Special Assistant to the President on Marine and Blue Economy and, concurrently, Chief of Staff to the Minister of Marine and Blue Economy, His Excellency Adegboyega Oyetola, positions that gave him frontline experience of both subnational and national policy execution within a single career.

On 8 May 2025, President Bola Tinubu appointed Akinola pioneer Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the newly established South-West Development Commission, the institution whose founding memorandum he himself had once chaired the committee to write. A statement issued on his seventieth birthday by the President’s Special Adviser on Information and Strategy, Bayo Onanuga, described him as a quintessential public policy strategist, development expert and accomplished administrator and noted that his career spans more than three decades of transformative leadership across government, international development, and the private sector, including his earlier role helping shape the Marine and Blue Economy agenda as Senior Special Assistant to the President.

Under Akinola’s leadership, SWDC has moved with notable speed from legislation to operations. The Commission is now headquartered in Ibadan, with a liaison office in Abuja and core management structures in place, and has built structured engagement with all six Southwest states — Ekiti, Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Oyo — and with key federal ministries, departments and agencies. On infrastructure, SWDC secured a provisional rail operating and track-access licence from the Nigerian Railway Corporation (NRC) to run passenger and freight services on existing narrow- and standard-gauge corridors in the region — not, as some public commentary mistakenly assumed, a licence to construct new tracks, but the foundation of what the Commission calls the South-West Rail, Agro-Industrial and Logistics platform, or SW-RAIL. In direct talks with NRC’s Managing Director, Dr Kayode Opeifa, Akinola set out a phased agenda: reactivating old, unserviced routes such as Osogbo-Dagbolu-Erunmu and the Idogo line on a profit-sharing basis in the short term, and securing new operational licences to bring in private rail investors and build new spurs connecting all six states to the national network in the medium term. Dr Opeifa, in turn, committed the corporation’s cooperation:

“What you are asking for is possible and will happen.”

Beyond rail, SWDC has stood up the South-West Agriculture Platform (SWAP), designed to optimise agricultural value chains from production and storage through processing and market access; the Transformed Communities programme (TransComs), which clusters communities into integrated economic units combining agriculture, energy, healthcare, microfinance, digital infrastructure and social protection; and SW-Digital, a proposed regional open-access fibre backbone of between fifteen and twenty thousand kilometres delivered through a public-private partnership. On financing, the Commission has designed the South-West Infrastructure Development Fund (SWIDF), a blended-finance platform intended to mobilise between one and two trillion naira in long-term capital for regional infrastructure, and the South-West Investment Company (SWIC), a commercial vehicle through which SWDC can take equity positions and co-invest alongside partners such as Odu’a Investment Company. The Commission has also begun building governance and compliance frameworks and a partnership with the National Open University of Nigeria to establish study centres across the six states.

Marking the milestone of his seventieth birthday, Ogun State Governor Dapo Abiodun described Akinola’s distinguished career, spanning over three decades across government, international development and the private sector, and praised him as:

“an exceptional administrator and public policy strategist”

SEVENTY YEARS IN

Seventy years in, Charles Akindiji Akinola is, by his own account, still listening — still building bridges between agriculture and industry, between Osogbo and Harvard, between the Southwest’s six states and the shared future he has spent four decades trying to construct for them. The young lecturer who once walked rural roads studying how farmers adopt new ideas is, at seventy, the man now walking the corridors of six state governments, the boardrooms of the Nigerian Railway Corporation and Odu’a Investment Company, and the halls of a commission he helped conceive — still asking the same question that animated his very first research four decades ago: how does an idea, once proven, become the shared inheritance of a whole region.

REFERENCES

1. Wikipedia — “Charles Akindiji Akinola.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Akindiji_Akinola
2. Premium Times — “Abiodun hails Southwest Dev’t Commission MD/CEO, Akinola at 70.” premiumtimesng.com
3. Daily Post — “Abiodun hails SWDC DG Charles Akinola at 70, salutes distinguished public service.” dailypost.ng
4. National Wire — “7 Things You Need to Know About Dr Charles Akindiji Akinola, the Newly Nominated Managing Director of SWDC.” nationalwire.com.ng
5. Business Insider Nigeria — “7 Things to Know About Dr Charles Akindiji Akinola, Newly Appointed Managing Director of SWDC.” businessinsiderng.com
6. The African Gong — “Who is this Dr Charles Akindiji Akinola of SWDC?” by Barrister Wale Ojo-Lanre. theafricangong.com
7. The Guardian Nigeria — “NRC, SWDC to revive rail connectivity in Southwest.” guardian.ng
8. Tribune Online — “SWDC clarifies misconceptions about rail project.” tribuneonlineng.com
9. Dr Charles Akindiji Akinola, LinkedIn profile.