Kogi East does not suffer from a scarcity of politicians. It suffers from a deficit of political memory. Its demographic weight, intellectual capital and electoral consequence should make it an irresistible force in Nigeria’s political calculus. Instead, factionalism repeatedly converts numerical strength into political impotence. The region remembers personalities but forgets patterns; remembers elections but forgets consequences; remembers victories but forgets the coalitions that made them possible.
That amnesia must not become contagious in Aso Rock. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should remember Kogi East—not as a constituency to be periodically courted, but as a political constituency whose contribution to Nigeria’s democratic arithmetic deserves recognition. The presidency is not a throne from which yesterday’s allies become disposable. Power has a long memory, or it should. Those who mobilised, negotiated, defended and voted within a political coalition should not become politically invisible after the coronation.
But Kogi East must also confront its own indictment. A region that cannot forge strategic consensus cannot complain when others dictate the terms of its political future. Its politicians have too often mistaken personal ambition for collective destiny and factional triumph for regional victory. Every election becomes another internecine contest, while the larger prize—development, representation, federal influence and political leverage—slips quietly through the fingers of those who claim to pursue it.
The most consequential question may therefore be one that Abuja has repeatedly left suspended in political limbo: when will Kogi East receive serious national consideration for state creation? The agitation is not a frivolous cartographic fantasy. It is rooted in arguments about administrative accessibility, population, geography, representation and developmental equity. For decades, the eastern senatorial district has existed within a state structure that many of its advocates regard as administratively imbalanced. If President Tinubu seeks a legacy beyond electoral arithmetic, he should be prepared to confront this question with intellectual honesty and constitutional seriousness.
State creation, admittedly, is not a presidential fiat. It is a constitutional enterprise requiring rigorous consultation, legislative concurrence and the satisfaction of prescribed legal thresholds. But presidents do not merely inhabit constitutional procedures; they influence the national imagination surrounding them. Tinubu can give the conversation oxygen. He can insist that the case be interrogated on its merits rather than buried beneath partisan expediency. He can encourage a national conversation about whether Nigeria’s present administrative architecture adequately serves the people it governs.
Kogi East, however, must not approach Abuja as a supplicant. It must arrive as a coherent political constituency. State creation cannot be achieved by isolated declarations from politicians who disappear when the microphones are switched off. It requires a disciplined coalition of elected officials, traditional institutions, civil society, professionals, youth organisations and ordinary citizens capable of articulating one formidable argument. The region must convert agitation into documentation, sentiment into strategy and aspiration into constitutional action.
President Tinubu should understand the reciprocal nature of political power. Kogi East should understand it too. The region cannot demand remembrance while practising political forgetfulness. Abuja cannot demand loyalty while treating strategic constituencies as expendable. A democratic alliance is not a blood covenant, but neither is it a disposable contract. Political debts may not be enforceable in court, yet history keeps an unforgiving ledger.
Tinubu’s political career itself offers the lesson. His ascent was not an accident of electoral weather. It was built through coalition architecture, political negotiation, strategic alliances and an understanding that power belongs to those capable of assembling disparate interests around a common objective. That makes the question unavoidable: if coalition-building was indispensable to his ascent, should the communities that contributed to that coalition become irrelevant after the ascent?
This is not a petition for patronage. It is an argument for political reciprocity. Kogi East does not require Abuja to manufacture its leaders or dictate its politics. It requires the federal government to recognise its legitimate developmental claims, its electoral significance and its longstanding aspiration for a new state. If the case is weak, let it be defeated by evidence. If it is constitutionally viable, let it be pursued with courage. What the region cannot afford is perpetual political suspense masquerading as national attention.
The greater indictment, however, remains within Kogi East itself. It must cease the politics of perpetual fragmentation. It must stop allowing politicians to mobilise ethnicity when convenient, party loyalty when expedient and regional consciousness only when seeking votes. A people cannot build enduring political leverage on temporary emotions. They need institutions, strategy, memory and negotiators who understand that political power is not merely the possession of office; it is the capacity to convert collective strength into enduring outcomes.
President Tinubu should therefore remember Kogi East. He should remember its voters, its political actors, its sacrifices and its aspirations. More importantly, he should remember that one of the most consequential tests of presidential statesmanship is not how loudly a government celebrates its friends, but how seriously it responds to their legitimate claims after the applause has faded.
Kogi East must remember too. It must remember every broken promise, every squandered opportunity and every election in which internal rivalry converted potential power into political defeat. It must remember that disunity is not merely unfortunate; politically, it is expensive.
Nigeria does not need another cycle of promises wrapped in ceremonial language.
Kogi East needs a political settlement anchored in representation, development and constitutional justice.
And if state creation is genuinely the region’s settled aspiration, President Tinubu should not consign it to the cemetery of abandoned demands.
Political alliances may be temporary. Political administrations may be transient. But political memory is the ledger by which history judges both the powerful and the forgotten.
Kogi East does not need a saviour.
It needs unity, strategic audacity—and a president who remembers.
– Inah Boniface Ocholi writes from Ayah – Igalamela/Odolu LGA, Kogi state.
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