Joseph Fadahunsi

Joseph Fadahunsi Biography / Profile

Sir Joseph Odeleye Fadahunsi was born around 1901 to the popular Faodi Fadahunsi household of Ilemo quarters of Ilesa, Osun State, Nigeria. He was a politician, businessman, administrator and educationist.

Joseph Fadahunsi Age

Not available.

Joseph Fadahunsi Early Life

The young Joseph unlike his much older siblings soon discovered that education held great promise in a nation that was transiting from a colonial rule to its independence. He enrolled at the Methodist High School in Ilesa after he had initially been taught privately at home under the watchful yet skeptical eyes of his parents. After graduation, he soon enrolled at the Wesley Teacher Training School in Ibadan.

Joseph Fadahunsi Career

Fadahunsi began his career in 1925 as a young teacher and was posted far and wide by the colonial authorities to areas such as Ikorodu and Lagos Island. He left the profession in 1927 to initially become a worker in various multinational trading firms such as the UAC, UTC and GBO. In 1948, he opted to float his own company called Ijesa United Trading and Transport Company after having saved enough capital to venture out on his own. The company was set up to buy produce from farmers to sell to the buyers mostly Europeans who usually exported such out of the country. The transport arm was founded not only to move his goods and those of other buyers but also people from one part of the country to the other.

The hardworking Fadahunsi earned the respect of other players in the industry who elected him the Secretary of the Produce Traders Union. This position soon availed him the opportunity to do a critical appraisal of the emerging produce trading industry and in the same year of 1948, he won a prize for his work titled, “The Improvement of Cocoa in Nigeria”. Fascinated by the write-up, the colonial authorities in Lagos soon appointed him as a member of the Cocoa Marketing Advisory and Board the following year and this prompted him to undertake a tour to the United Kingdom to study local government administration.

Fadahunsi was able galvanise the membership of the then National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons to popularity in his Ijesa enclave and by extension, the Osun Division. Fadahunsi was a patron and vice-president of the NCNC. He was elected a member of the old Western House of Assembly on the platform of the party. He served between 1951 and 1961. He held the position concurrently with the chairmanship of the then Ijesa Divisional Council. That was after he relinquished his position as the chairman of the board of the Nigeria Airways. While at the Western House, he served as the deputy opposition leader under the late storm petrel of Western politics, Chief Gbadamosi Adegoke Adelabu, whom he later succeeded upon his (Adelabu’s death).

Fadahunsi was appointed the governor of the Western Region in 1962 following the resignation of the late Sir Adesoji Aderemi (the then Ooni of Ife). His governorship was terminated with the military coup of 1966 and since then, he retired to community service as he was appointed by the Ijesa community as chairman of two schools namely, Ilesa Grammar School and Obokun High School, both in Ilesa, Osun State. He shunned the temptation to return to partisan politics in the Second Republic but did not live long to see it (the Republic) mature.