By Secrets Reporters
SecretsReporters set out to establish who stands behind the printing of the ballot papers for the 2027 general election, and the trail of documents ends at a desk inside the Ogun State Government, at the seat of the Secretary to the State Government, Olatokunbo Joseph Talabi. He is the most senior appointed official of an All Progressives Congress government, he remains on paper the president of the security printing house that claims the election materials of three general elections, and he is the beneficial owner of a company in the British Virgin Islands that he went to court in November 2025 to bring back from the dead. The three records have never been placed side by side until now.
The Ogun State Government’s own appointment statement of 15 June 2019, carried by the state broadcaster OGBC, records that Governor Dapo Abiodun approved the appointment of Olatokunbo Joseph Talabi as Secretary to the State Government, and that Talabi was until his appointment the Chief Executive Officer of Superflux International Limited, described in the same statement as a market leader in security printing. He was reappointed in June 2023 at the start of the governor’s second term and he remains in the office in October 2026, seven years and four months in government across both terms of the Abiodun administration. Before June 2019 he held no government office anywhere. His career to that point ran through banking and through the printing house he left for the appointment.
The printing house he left is Superflux International Limited, and its own published record is the fullest account of its election work anywhere. On its Government page the company states in its own words: “We have the experience and capacity to locally produce election materials including ballot papers, result sheets, certificate of return and other election materials. We produced electoral materials for the general elections in 2011, 2015 and 2019. We have also produced election materials for state and local government elections. We have the ability to deliver millions of ballot papers within a very short timeframe.” Elsewhere on its own site the company states that it serves electoral commissions in Nigeria and other African nations, printing high-security ballot papers with serial numbering and encrypted barcode verification. The company also claims accreditation by the Central Bank of Nigeria under NICPAS and ISO 9001:2015 certification.
The separation between the man and the printing house was never completed on the company’s own paper. In its announcement of 16 July 2020, Superflux International Limited recorded the appointment of Gabriel Okonkwo as its Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, and stated in the same announcement: “Mr. Tokunbo Talabi remains the President of Superflux Group.” The company’s own team page carries the family further into the house, listing Aderinola Talabi and Wonuola Talabi on its board. Seven years after he left the chief executive’s chair for government, the company’s own publications still carry him as the president of its group.
The house is also positioning in the open for the next election cycle. On 19 January 2026 the company’s Managing Director, Gabriel Okonkwo, published a paper on the company website arguing that INEC, WAEC, NECO, JAMB and UBEC must procure 100 percent of their ballot papers from certified domestic security printers and converters under Executive Order 003. The argument places the domestic security printers at the front of the queue for the printing of the 2027 ballot papers, Superflux first among them on its own account of its history.
SecretsReporters searched the public record for the official side of this history and found none of it there. No document of the Independent National Electoral Commission made public names the printer of the ballot papers for the 2027 general election, no record of the Bureau of Public Procurement names one, and no INEC document made public names Superflux International Limited for any past election cycle. The only public claims of the company’s election work are the company’s own, carried on its own website, and the only public record of the man’s continuing place at the head of the house is the company’s own announcement.
The third record is the island company, and it is published here for the first time. Gardenia Development Ltd is a company of the British Virgin Islands, business number 1628936, incorporated on 26 January 2011 and registered to Vistra Corporate Services Centre, Wickhams Cay II, Road Town, Tortola. The United Kingdom’s Register of Overseas Entities, where Gardenia was registered on 24 January 2023 under entry OE017183, names Olatokunbo Joseph Talabi, born June 1962, and Aderinola Oyindamola Talabi, born March 1967, as the beneficial owners of the company from 26 January 2011, the day of its incorporation, and gives its correspondence address as 3 Vori Close, Ikeja, Lagos, the head office address of Superflux International Limited. No other outlet has ever reported the Talabis’ ownership of Gardenia Development Ltd. SecretsReporters publishes it exclusively, from the registers and the court file its own investigation pulled.
The law speaks directly to that ownership. The Code of Conduct for Public Officers, set out in Part I of the Fifth Schedule to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999, provides that a public officer shall not engage or participate in the management or running of any private business, profession or trade, and it excepts farming alone. The same Code of Conduct requires every public officer to declare his assets to the Code of Conduct Bureau immediately after taking office, once every four years during his tenure, and at the end of that tenure, and the assets that duty covers include property held through a company and property held outside Nigeria. Olatokunbo Joseph Talabi took office as Secretary to the Ogun State Government on 15 June 2019. The Register of Overseas Entities names him a beneficial owner of Gardenia Development Ltd from 26 January 2011 and through every year of his tenure, and the powers recorded against his name on that register include the right to appoint and remove the directors of the company. No public record shows the Secretary to the State Government disclosing the island company at any point in his seven years in office.
Gardenia Development Ltd was dissolved on 2 November 2022. On 14 November 2025, three years after the dissolution, Olatokunbo Joseph Talabi filed a fixed date claim at the Commercial Division of the High Court of the British Virgin Islands, claim BVIHCOM2025/0487, against the Registrar of Corporate Affairs. In the claim he applies under section 218 of the BVI Business Companies Act for the dissolution to be declared void, for the company to be restored to the register, and for any property of the company that was not disposed of at its dissolution and that vested in the Crown to be returned to the company. He signed the certificate of truth in his own name as the company’s former director. The claim was filed on 14 November 2025, in the seventh year of his tenure as a public officer, and the act is his own from first to last: a sitting Secretary to a State Government applying in his own name to void the dissolution of his private foreign company, to restore it to the register, and to recover its property from the Crown. Part I of the Fifth Schedule provides that a public officer found in breach of the Code of Conduct shall vacate the office he holds, shall stand disqualified from holding public office for a period of up to ten years, and shall forfeit to the State any property acquired in abuse or corruption of office.
