Abraham Adesanya was an honored political leader in the lineage of Obafemi Awolwo and Adekunle Ajasin with the title of Asiwaju of Yorubaland. Adesanya was born on July 24, 1922, in Ijebu Igbo into the family of the famous traditional healer Ezekiel. He completed his secondary education at Ijebu Igbo High School. After a short stint as a teacher, he went to Holbon College to study law. After returning to Nigeria in 1959, Adesanya joined the Awolowo Action Group and was elected to the Western House Assembly in the same year.
Against the advice of his Ijebu-Igbo people who wanted their own governor, he chooses to sit as a senator in the Federal Legislative Assembly where he implemented the principles of his Avoist ideology in the Second Republic of Nigeria from 1979 to 1983. Approx two decades earlier, he led a team of lawyers who defended Obafemi Awolowo during the political conflicts before the fall of the First Republic. Refusing to join his compatriots in exile under the highly repressive regime of General Sani Abacha, Adesanya stayed and led a fierce resistance to military rule with the then widely recognized National Democratic Coalition (NADECO).
Fifteen years later, when democracy had fully returned to Nigeria, Abraham Adesanya formed a coalition composed primarily of Awo’s former allies and supporters of his ideology. His political party, the Alliance for Democracy, dominated the southwest until 2003, when the region joined President Obasanjo’s more central People’s Democratic Party.
Adesanya’s illness confined him to his residence in Lagos Apapa for about five years, where his role became an advisory role in the Afenifere Renaissance Awoist group he led. He died on April 27, 2008. The Mercedes-Benz car he was in during the attack in January 1997 was taken to a museum in Lagos.
