Politics, contrary to popular performance, is not always loud. Noise is cheap; power is not. Power rarely announces itself with trumpets or press statements. More often, it reveals itself through the anxiety it provokes, the calculations it unsettles, and the preemptive moves it forces from those who claim to control the system. Kogi State today is gripped by such a quiet disturbance, and at the center of it stands Yakubu Murtala Ajaka.
Ajaka has not declared for the 2027 Senate. He has not declared for any office. Yet the political atmosphere across the state is taut, uneasy, and charged with anticipation. This is not a coincidence. It is a consequence.
Since the 2023 governorship election, and more decisively following the Supreme Court’s final verdict in August 2024, Ajaka has defied the standard gravity of Nigerian politics. By all conventional logic, a judicial loss should have marked the end of a political movement. Ordinarily, when the gavel falls, the crowds thin out, loyalty evaporates, and political structures migrate toward the declared winner in search of relevance and survival. With Ajaka, the opposite happened.
The court delivered legal finality, but it failed to deliver political closure. In the 2023 contest, Ajaka secured 259,052 votes spread across Kogi’s three senatorial districts. This was not a marginal showing. It was a statewide electoral footprint large enough to fracture the long-held assumption of an unassailable incumbency advantage. Those votes did not dissolve with the judgment. They hardened into memory, expectation, and political identity. What emerged was a rare and deeply unsettling phenomenon: a leader without a certificate of return who nonetheless commands more organic loyalty than those clothed with the seal of office.
This anomaly helps explain the physical aggression, intimidation, and security threats that have continued to trail Ajaka even after the courts affirmed a winner. When a system resorts to coercion against an opponent who has technically lost, it betrays a deeper insecurity. It is the recognition that while a judgment can award a title, it cannot transfer affection. The state may possess legality, but Ajaka retained legitimacy.
This is precisely why Ajaka unsettles the establishment. His presence punctures a long-standing assumption in Kogi politics: that relevance must be conferred by office and authority must radiate outward from Government House. Ajaka’s influence has travelled in the opposite direction, from the people to the elite, from the margins to the center. In doing so, he has exposed an uncomfortable truth for incumbents: power can arise independently of the state and endure without its permission.
The fear, therefore, is rational. Rivals do not fear competition; they fear redundancy. Incumbents do not fear debate; they fear erasure. The state fears uncertainty because Ajaka does not operate within the predictable grammar of patronage politics. He is not driven by appointments, budget lines, or coercive instruments. His power is social and mnemonic, rooted in memory, connection, and belief. These are assets no decree can confiscate and no maneuver can neutralize.
It is within this climate of anxiety that reports have surfaced of the state government promising senatorial tickets to no fewer than eight individuals from Kogi East. This is not political generosity. It is a calculated attempt to manufacture division between co-opted elites and a resolute grassroots base. The strategy rests on an old and increasingly unreliable assumption: that if you purchase the shepherds, the flock will obediently follow.
Recent events have exposed the flaw in that logic with brutal clarity. First, Ajaka’s own Deputy Governorship candidate was induced to defect. Conventional political wisdom would predict a collapse of momentum. Instead, Ajaka’s popularity surged. The base did not scatter; it consolidated. Then, in November 2025, the SDP Zonal Chairman for Kogi East followed the same path, surrendering his title for a photo opportunity with the Governor in Lokoja. These defections were triumphantly advertised as proof of Ajaka’s political collapse. They were nothing of the sort. The state may have acquired officers, but it failed to command the troops. Containment strategies work only against transactional politicians. They fail against movements sustained by shared grievance, memory, and hope. Tickets can be divided. Belief cannot.
Much commentary has focused on whether Ajaka will contest the Senate or aim higher. But this question itself reflects a shallow understanding of power. It assumes that ambition creates relevance. Ajaka has inverted that logic. His relevance now creates ambition. Whether he contests the governorship tomorrow or the Senate next year is almost incidental to the deeper reality disturbing the system: he can move down the ballot without diminishing or move up it without permission. That elasticity is fatal to rigid political hierarchies.
The Senate, in this context, is not a descent. In the hands of a figure whose political base predates the office, it becomes a platform of consolidation, a bridge between grassroots legitimacy and national leverage. What unsettles the political class is not the title Ajaka might pursue, but the precedent he embodies: that representation grounded in lived connection can overwhelm incumbency, and that electoral equations long assumed to be settled remain dangerously fluid.
What most disquiets the establishment is Ajaka’s relationship with ordinary people. Not choreographed rallies. Not rented crowds. But credibility accumulated slowly, relationally, over time. In an era marked by voter cynicism and transactional exhaustion, such credibility is revolutionary capital. This explains why rumors of obstruction precede intention, why whispers travel faster than facts, and why silence is mistaken for weakness by the inattentive and recognized as strategy by those who understand power.
Ajaka’s most significant threat to the status quo is not merely electoral; it is philosophical. He challenges the assumption that the state is the sole author of legitimacy. Edmund Burke once warned that people surrender their liberties only under delusion. Kogi’s present anxiety reflects a ruling class confronted by a public increasingly resistant to such delusions. Ajaka reminds the state that authority does not originate solely from sworn oaths, but from trust patiently built over time.
History teaches that political systems rarely fear loud opposition. They fear credible alternatives. Ajaka represents such an alternative, undeclared, informal, yet already operational in the political consciousness of the people.
Whether he declares today, tomorrow, or not at all, one fact is beyond dispute: Yakubu Murtala Ajaka has altered Kogi’s political equation. He has demonstrated that popular legitimacy can outgun state power, that grassroots loyalty can rival incumbency, and that silence, when anchored in substance, can be louder than declarations.
Kogi is not afraid of Ajaka because of what he has said.
Kogi is afraid because of what he represents.
And in politics, representation, real representation, is the most dangerous form of power.
— Yusuf M. A., PhD
Political Analyst & Public Affairs Commentator
Abuja, Nigeria
