Dideolu Falobi has spent his life building things that rise. For over two decades, the quiet but determined Managing Director of Kresta Laurel Limited has helped cranes, elevators and industrial systems redefine Nigeria’s skyline. Now, at the height of his corporate career, the engineer finds himself drawn to a different kind of architecture—the fragile scaffolding of governance. It is a pivot that feels at once natural and paradoxical: a man who has made steel dance to precision turning to the infinitely messier business of politics.
Falobi speaks with the calm conviction of someone who has outlasted storms. Oil price crashes, regulatory hurdles, hostile multinationals—he has seen them all and survived. His secret, he insists, lies in learning to play the long game.
“When you’re young,” he once quipped, “you’re like Jay-Jay Okocha at his peak, dribbling past everyone and scoring. But as you mature, you let the ball do the talking—you look for the right pass. Management is much the same.”
For him, leadership has become less about heroic solo runs and more about building a team that will carry the game forward.
That philosophy has served Kresta Laurel well. Founded in the late 1980s, the company has weathered decades of turbulence to become Nigeria’s undisputed leader in the crane and elevator industry. “When we started, there were only a handful of local players,” he recalls.
“Thirty-five years later, we’re the only ones still standing at the top of the game.”
Today, Falobi’s firm installs and maintains equipment in some of the country’s tallest buildings—projects once thought the exclusive preserve of multinational giants. The company’s journey from scrappy indigenous outfit to ISO-certified industry benchmark is not just a business story; it is a parable of persistence in a landscape that too often rewards shortcuts.
But behind the steel and certifications lies a man marked by fragility. Twice in his life, Falobi has stared down the barrel of armed robbery, once with bullets fired in his direction. These moments, he admits, left him permanently sensitised to risk.
“When you’ve gone through near-death experiences twice, you become instinctively alert,” he reflects.
“In an industry where my teams work at dangerous heights, my obsession with safety is no mere compliance. At Kresta Laurel, every employee is trained as a safety officer, with daily talks and rituals drilled into the culture.”
To Falobi, survival—personal and corporate—is never accidental; it is engineered.
Yet, it would be misleading to cast him only as the hard-nosed technocrat. At heart, Falobi is a man of attachments, not least to family. For decades, he maintained a ritual of visiting his late aging parents at least twice a month, sometimes for hours, sometimes just for moments. He speaks tenderly of his wife, whom he credits with teaching him patience and money management.
“She is an amazing partner, friend and lover,” he says, in words rare among buttoned-up corporate chiefs.
And his eyes still brighten when he recalls the communal effort of refurbishing his old secondary school in Ilesa, where he and fellow students raised funds, re-roofed 42 classrooms and built laboratories without a single moneybag in sight.
For him, the work of building—whether steel towers or human institutions—has always been deeply personal.
That personal commitment has spilled over into his civic roles. As a Fellow of the Nigerian Society of Engineers and two-term Chairman of the Board of Fellows at the Institution of Safety Engineers, Falobi has spent years advocating for better tooling, curriculum reforms and the integration of “town and gown.”
He is candid about the poor remuneration of engineers in Nigeria, and has urged colleagues to build companies that pay properly rather than lament.
His lectures, delivered in Nigeria and abroad, often strike a balance between technocratic precision and moral urgency. There is, in his words, a need to “marry the gown and town” and rescue engineering education from decades of neglect.
If engineering has been his profession, strategic thinking has become his passion.
In 2021, he convened the Think Tank of Nigeria, a collective of over 300 professionals who analyse national challenges and issue communiqués to the government.
“Whatever bad happens in governance, everyone bears the pain,” he explains.
“You must be part of the conversation, offering support so that good governance can happen.”
It is a worldview shaped less by partisanship than by a sense of obligation: the belief that the governed must not leave the governors alone.
“I have written personal letters to presidents and vice presidents, offering unsolicited advice.”
He speaks admiringly of leaders who combine courage with strategy, citing President Bola Tinubu’s willingness to make unpopular but necessary economic decisions as evidence that politics need not always be bereft of planning.
Yet for all his proximity to power, Falobi long resisted the lure of politics. In a 2014 interview, he famously said “never say never,” but dismissed speculation of a political career.
At the time, he was consumed with building Kresta Laurel and mentoring a generation of engineers. But with the company now “almost on autopilot,” he has begun to see politics not as a distraction but as the next frontier of service.
=Three weeks ago, he declared his intention to contest the governorship of Osun State under the banner of the All-Progressives Congress (APC).
It is, by his own admission, a daunting leap. Osun’s incumbent governor, Ademola Adeleke, is popular and entrenched. The political terrain is littered with landmines, from internal party squabbles to a sceptical public weary of elites. Yet Falobi is undeterred.
“Never underestimate anybody, least of all a sitting governor,” he concedes.
“But I have a conviction that I could do better. He has done his bit, put in his best. Now it is time to retire him—respectfully.”
There is no malice in his voice, only the certainty of a man used to planning projects down to the last nut and bolt.
If elected, his vision is straightforward: keep every citizen of Osun usefully engaged. He frames unemployment not just as an economic problem but as a moral hazard.
“If you have able-bodied people waking up daily with no jobs to do, they are negatively impacting society,” he warns.
“My remedy is a cocktail of tools—healthcare, agriculture, food security, industrialisation and youth empowerment—all anchored in the same philosophy that has guided my approach to business: that what you give must be more than what you take.”
Critics will no doubt point out that business success does not automatically translate into political skill. Falobi counters by invoking his apprenticeship under Otunba Gbenga Daniel, the businessman-turned-governor who mentored him for decades.
“You can’t find a better tutor,” he says with quiet confidence.
Indeed, one senses that his entire career has been a rehearsal for this moment: the early crowdfunding for classrooms, the alumni association projects at the University of Lagos, the daily risk management at construction sites, the think tank communiqués—all strands of a life preparing for the messy work of governance.
Still, the paradox remains. Here is a man who insists he is not wealthy “in naira and kobo” but radiates contentment. A man forged by brushes with death who chooses to speak of gratitude. A man whose professional life revolves around lifting machines, yet whose personal mission has become lifting people. The steel is real, but so is the softness.
His legacy, he says, will not be measured in skyscrapers but in leaving “wherever I find myself better than I met it.”
In the end, Falobi’s leap into politics is less about ambition than continuity. The boy who once mobilised classmates to repair a dilapidated school has become the man who wants to repair a struggling state. The engineer who spent decades hoisting steel now seeks to hoist society itself.
Whether Osun voters will trust him with that mandate remains to be seen. But even if the ballot proves less forgiving than the boardroom, Falobi has already built something rare: a life that rises from steel to statecraft, always guided by the same invisible machinery—gratitude, resilience and faith.
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