By The deed is dated 2 November 2017, and it sits in the property records of Cobb County, Georgia. Ademola Adeleke had been a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria for under four months, sworn into the Senate on 12 July 2017 to represent Osun West after the death of his elder brother. In that November, on the record of an American county, the new senator bought a townhouse in the suburbs of Atlanta for $525,000, about N160 million at the official rate of the day, and he has held it through his years in the Senate, his years out of office and his rise to the governorship of Osun State, without a word about it on the Nigerian public record.
The owner named on the record is Adeleke Ademola Jackson, the governor’s full documented name. SecretsReporters examination of the Cobb County property record shows the house at 2124 Monhegan Way SE, Unit 11, Smyrna, Georgia 30080, passed to him by grant deed dated 2 November 2017, recorded on 8 November 2017 in Deed Book 15492 under document 201727464. The sellers were Huey L Thomas and Felicia K Thomas, and the price on the deed is $525,000.
The same deed record carries the detail that joins the buyer to the senator beyond argument. Against the purchase stands a transaction mortgage of $525,000, the full price of the house, dated the same 8 November 2017, and the lender named on it is Pacific Holdings Ltd. Pacific Holdings is the Adeleke family conglomerate, and Ademola Adeleke was its Group Executive Director from 2001 to 2016, the office he left on his road into politics. The money that carried the Atlanta purchase came, on the face of the American record, from the family’s own company.
What the money bought stands in the Town Homes at Ivy Walk. The property is a townhouse built in 2005, two storeys, three bedrooms and three bathrooms on the county summary, 4,001 square feet of living area on a lot of 0.05 acres. The county file marks the owner as not occupying it, and carries a rent estimate of $4,521 a month against it.
Its value has climbed while its owner climbed. The market value of the townhouse now stands at $670,074, against the $525,000 paid for it. The assessed value carried against it for 2026 is $286,004, and its tax bill for the year came to $8,617.
The record carries one further address. The owner’s mailing address on the Cobb County file is not the Smyrna townhouse but 833 Northam Ln, Sandy Springs, Georgia 30342, a second address in the same Atlanta metropolis in the governor’s name.
Atlanta is not new ground to Adeleke, and the record of his life says so plainly. He worked in the city as a young man, with Quicksilver Courier Company from 1985 to 1989 and as Vice President of Origin International Llc from 1990 to 1994, and he returned to the city decades later to take a degree in Criminal Justice at Atlanta Metropolitan State College in 2021. Between those Atlanta years he was an Executive Director of Guinness Nigeria Plc and then Group Executive Director of Pacific Holdings for fifteen years. The townhouse was bought in the middle of that story, after the businesses and before the governorship, in the first months of his public life.
His public life began with a by-election. When Senator Isiaka Adeleke died in April 2017, his younger brother contested the Osun West senatorial by-election, won it, and took the oath on 12 July 2017. The Smyrna deed followed in the November of that same year. He left the Senate in 2019, contested the Osun governorship, and on 27 November 2022 he was sworn in as Governor of Osun State, the office he holds today.
The law that governs a man in Adeleke’s position is written in the Code of Conduct for public officers, and it binds every public officer in Nigeria on the same terms, the elected, the appointed and the career civil servant alike. On assumption of office, at the end of every four years and at the end of his tenure, a public officer must declare all his properties, assets and liabilities, and those of his spouse and his unmarried children below the age of eighteen, to the Code of Conduct Bureau, and assets held outside Nigeria must be declared with their value stated in the currency of the country where they sit. The Constitution provides that where an asset acquired by a public officer after a declaration cannot be fairly attributed to his income, a gift or an approved loan, the asset is presumed to have been acquired in breach of the Code unless the contrary is proved, and a breach carries removal from office, disqualification from public office for up to ten years, and seizure and forfeiture of the property to the state.
Adeleke has passed through the declaration points of that law one after another: on entering the Senate in 2017, the year of the deed; at the end of his Senate tenure in 2019; and on assumption of office as governor in 2022. Whether the townhouse at 2124 Monhegan Way, Smyrna, stands in any of those declarations, and how it is carried in them, are questions the Code of Conduct Bureau’s files alone can answer. No filing open to the Nigerian public speaks of the house. What speaks is the Cobb County record, deed, mortgage and all, and on it the name has read Adeleke Ademola Jackson since November 2017.
