By Adams Yusuf
A press conference was recently held on URAH TV in which a group of men, seated behind a white draped table, declared themselves the custodians of Yakubu Murtala Ajaka’s 2023 political movement and issued what amounted to a public verdict of betrayal against a leader whose political journey they now appear determined to define on their own terms.
Ordinarily, such declarations are not unusual in Nigerian opposition politics. Every electoral cycle produces factions, grievances, emotional ruptures, and competing interpretations of sacrifice and loyalty. But one sentence from that press conference immediately distinguished it from ordinary political disagreement.
Hassan Enape, speaking as the principal voice of the group, described His Excellency Yakubu Murtala Ajaka as nothing more than “our arrowhead who we used.”
Used.
That word deserves serious examination, not through emotion, but through political analysis, democratic logic, and basic human dignity. Because once the full story is honestly told, the argument advanced at that URAH TV table does not merely weaken.
It collapses completely.
THE MAN WHO BUILT THE HOUSE BEFORE THEY MOVED IN
Yakubu Murtala Ajaka did not arrive at the APC as a latecomer seeking favours. He arrived as one of its builders.
His political journey began before the APC even existed. He served as Deputy State Secretary of the Action Congress in the FCT Chapter and was appointed National Assembly Liaison Officer in December 2006.
When the historic merger of ACN, ANPP, and CPC formed the APC in 2013, Ajaka was appointed Coordinator of one of the merger committees. He was not watching from outside.
He was building from within.
He later became pioneer Head of Protocol of the APC in 2013, Special Assistant to the National Secretary in 2014, Special Adviser to the National Chairman in 2020, and eventually Deputy National Publicity Secretary at the 2022 APC National Convention, serving as a full member of the National Working Committee.
For nearly a decade, he served the progressive cause with distinction. During the 2023 presidential campaign, few politicians in Kogi State matched his sacrifice, visibility, and commitment toward the success of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. At a time when political survival demanded silence or neutrality, Ajaka stood publicly and firmly with the progressive movement.
This is the man Hassan Enape casually described as an arrowhead that was used.
HOW A LOYAL SON WAS THROWN OUT OF HIS OWN HOUSE
The story of how Ajaka left the APC is not the story of an angry politician walking away from his party.
It is the story of a loyal party man being systematically excluded by the very structure he had spent years helping to strengthen.
Ajaka himself explained that there was a mutual political understanding founded on cooperation, trust, and strategic alignment within the APC ahead of the 2023 governorship race. He committed his political capital and organizational strength to the structure with the expectation of fairness and inclusion.
What followed instead was calculated political exclusion.
A kangaroo committee was reportedly constituted in Ajaka’s own ward, the community that bears his family name, with the sole purpose of suspending him from the APC.
He was subsequently barred from participating in the APC governorship primary held on April 14, 2023. A man who spent nearly a decade building the party was effectively locked out of the same structure he had helped strengthen.
His resignation letter dated May 17, 2023 was addressed to APC National Chairman Senator Abdullahi Adamu. He departed quietly, with dignity and restraint.
He moved to the Social Democratic Party not because he abandoned progressive politics, but because the APC structure in Kogi under Yahaya Bello had first abandoned him.
He did not leave the house willingly.
He was pushed out of it.
That is the political history the Enape group erased from their URAH TV press conference.
That is the decade of service and sacrifice they reduced to the word “used.”
THE INSULT THAT REVEALS THE ARGUMENT
Reasonable people may disagree about Ajaka’s political choices, but disagreement should never erase historical fact.
An arrowhead is fired and forgotten. It has no agency. It exists to serve the archer and is discarded after impact.
That is how Hassan Enape publicly described His Excellency Yakubu Murtala Ajaka, a man who spent a decade building the APC from the ground up, was expelled under controversial circumstances, moved into opposition politics, polled 259,052 votes against the full machinery of state power, challenged the result through every legal avenue available, and later made the strategic decision to return to the party he helped build.
The arrowhead metaphor is therefore not merely politically clumsy.
It is morally revealing.
It unintentionally exposes a deeper mentality beneath the criticism itself: the belief that Ajaka existed primarily as a political instrument to be deployed, directed, and perhaps reclaimed by others.
But Yakubu Murtala Ajaka’s political history does not support that interpretation.
He is not a tool.
He is not an arrowhead.
He is not anybody’s political instrument.
He is a political actor with his own history, agency, constituency, and strategic judgment.
No group of eight men seated at a conference table, regardless of their contribution to the 2023 movement, possesses the authority to reduce that extraordinary journey into the description of something they fired and now wish to reclaim.
THE FATAL FLAW THAT DESTROYS THE ENTIRE PRESS CONFERENCE
Beyond the emotional rhetoric lies a far deeper and more structurally devastating problem with the Enape group’s position.
The 259,052 votes secured by Yakubu Murtala Ajaka in the November 2023 governorship election did not belong exclusively to Kogi East.
That fact alone fundamentally alters the legitimacy of the entire press conference.
Those votes came from Kogi East.
They also came from Kogi West.
They came from Kogi Central.
They came from Dekina and Idah and Ankpa and Ofu and Ibaji, but they equally came from Okene and Adavi and Kabba and Ijumu and Koton Karfe and Lokoja and Ogori Magongo and Mopa Muro.
They came from Igala men and women, Ebira voters, Okun communities, Bassa citizens, Nupe voters, Gwari communities, Yoruba residents, and ordinary Kogites who simply wanted a different future for their state.
None of those constituencies were represented at that URAH TV table.
The approximately eight men seated there were not elected to speak for all 259,052 voters.
They were not authorized to issue a statewide democratic verdict on behalf of every citizen who supported the movement.
And they certainly do not possess exclusive ownership over a mandate that emerged from all three senatorial districts.
That omission is not minor.
It is politically fatal.
When a statewide democratic coalition is reduced into the emotional property of a small regional caucus, the movement itself becomes smaller than the coalition that originally produced it.
That is precisely the danger.
The movement was never exclusively Igala.
It was never exclusively Kogi East.
It was a statewide expression of dissatisfaction with the direction of governance in Kogi State.
Reducing that movement into a privately owned grievance structure fundamentally misunderstands the breadth of what happened in 2023.
WHAT EVERY KOGI VOTER DESERVES TO HEAR
There is an Okun voter in Kabba Bunu who supported Ajaka in November 2023 not because of tribe, but because he wanted a better Kogi State.
Nobody consulted him before the URAH TV declaration.
There is an Ebira voter in Okene who quietly voted against the dominant political structure in his own environment under difficult circumstances.
Nobody asked whether he believed the movement had been betrayed.
There are voters across Lokoja, Kogi West, and Kogi Central who contributed to the 259,052 votes and who do not accept the idea that the movement belongs exclusively to one group speaking from one table.
Those voters matter.
Their ballots matter.
Their political ownership matters.
And any attempt to erase them weakens the democratic legitimacy of the argument being advanced.
The Kogi West and Kogi Central voters who supported Ajaka in 2023 are co owners of that mandate, equal in democratic standing to every voter from Kogi East.
Any declaration that erases them is incomplete by definition and invalid by democratic logic.
THE VERDICT HISTORY WILL RECORD
His Excellency Yakubu Murtala Ajaka was never an arrowhead.
He was never a tool.
He was never a political vehicle hired, deployed, and later discarded by political actors who now feel entitled to ownership over his journey.
He was one of the early builders of the progressive movement before it fully became the APC. He sat in the rooms where the party was assembled and contributed his relationships, intelligence, organizational energy, and years of service toward building it.
He later found himself excluded from the same structure he helped strengthen.
He responded not with violence, but with democratic resolve.
He campaigned across Kogi State.
He absorbed the attacks.
He watched supporters die.
He polled 259,052 votes against a political machinery designed to destroy him.
He fought through every available legal avenue with the discipline of a man who still believed in democratic process even when the system disappointed him.
And now he is returning, not as a defeated supplicant, but as a proven political force, to the party he helped build, carrying a relevance his opponents could not destroy and a mandate the Supreme Court could not emotionally extinguish.
The men at the URAH TV table are not his judges.
The 259,052 voters of Kogi State, East, West, and Central, are his constituency.
And that constituency, in its full democratic breadth, will eventually render the only verdict that truly matters:
The verdict of the ballot box in 2027.
To every voter across all three senatorial districts, the Kogi Equity Alliance says this plainly:
You voted for a leader in 2023.
That leader is still standing.
Still fighting.
Still building.
The arrowhead did not break.
The man who built the house has come back to finish what he started.
No press conference can erase that history.
No manufactured narrative can reverse it.
And no group of men, however sincere their grievance may be, can privatize what belongs to the democratic expression of an entire state.
The record has now been set straight.
Let it stand.
– Adams Yusuf writes from Abuja.
