Professor Ayo Olukotun is dead

Professor Ayo Olukotun, a University Don, newspaper columnist, renowned political scientist, and media scholar, is dead.

Reports on the cause of death is still sketchy. The news was broken on the Facebook page of one Bukola Adeyemi who wrote:

“The late Professor Olukotun was the Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona Professorial Chair in Governance, Political Science Department, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State,

“Professor Olukotun is a “mentor”, an “enviable academic” and a “fine columnist”, whose works have contributed to the shaping of public policy and discourse in the past three decades.”

Ayo Olukotun, a renowned political scientist and media scholar, is the Oba Sikiru Kayode Adetona Professorial Chair in Governance, Political Science Department, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State. He was a “mentor”, an “enviable academic” and a “fine columnist”, whose works have contributed to the shaping of public policy and discourse in the past three decades.

As an academic, he lectured at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, University of Lagos and Lagos State University. He was a visiting professor of International Relations at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.

He was also a distinguished professor and head, Department of Political Science and Dean, Faculty of Social Sciences at the Lead City University. As a journalist, he was the Chair of the Editorial Board of Daily Times.

Through his weekly penetrative columns that have appeared in Daily Times, Guardian, Compass and Punch and several other frontline newspapers, Olukotun, according to his profile on conversation.com, “evokes deep ideas to challenge issues of bad governance in the country, while copiously recommending alternative pathways to national redemption.”