By Ozumi Abdul.
They fetch water with songs of sorrow, trudging hills with empty kegs, their feet bruised on jagged stones. In some villages of Kogi Central, children with backs bent like frail elders march before dawn, carrying yellow containers like burdens they never chose. This is their ritual, their inheritance, stream water for survival, in a state blessed with rivers that could quench thirst a thousand times over.
It is here, in the land where three of Nigeria’s great rivers embrace, that deprivation wears the face of ordinary people. The young mother who straps two gallons across her chest, the farmer who returns from the stream with dust-stained legs, the grandfather who recalls when politicians promised pipe-borne water “soon.” Their stories rhyme with absence.
Their pain is not today’s tragedy but yesterday’s prophecy come true, repeated for thirty-four long years. Kogi State, created on August 27, 1991, alongside states like Jigawa, Yobe, Osun, and Ebonyi, was born into the promise of modernity. It was to be the confluence jewel, an industrial pivot, a bridge between the North and South. With iron ore, limestone, coal, fertile land, and above all, the Ajaokuta Steel Complex, the so-called bedrock of Nigeria’s industrial revolution, Kogi had no reason to crawl when others could run.
Yet, three decades later, while its peers soar with new skylines, universities, and health infrastructure, Kogi still struggles to provide clean water for its people. This paradox, wealth beneath, want above, has defined the trajectory of a state that should have been Nigeria’s industrial capital. Instead, it has become a case study in arrested development, crippled by corruption, ethnic rivalries, and chronic misgovernance. To call yesterday a celebration of creation would be dishonest; it is, in truth, an hour for sobering reflection. When Kogi was carved out in 1991, Osun State was also born. Today, Osun boasts over thirty tertiary institutions, including the prestigious Obafemi Awolowo University Teaching Hospital, and has diversified its economy through agriculture, tourism, and education. Its GDP per capita, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) 2023 report, stands around $2,500, more than double Kogi’s average. Ebonyi, another 1991 state, once dismissed as “dusty and poor,” now prides itself as one of Nigeria’s fastest-growing subnational economies.
Between 2015 and 2023, Ebonyi recorded a 400% increase in internally generated revenue (IGR), driven by massive investment in road networks, schools, and health centers. Its capital, Abakaliki, wears new highways and streetlights, a testimony to leadership that prioritizes infrastructure. Jigawa and Yobe, once dismissed as backwaters in the far north, now showcase measurable strides in education and healthcare delivery. Jigawa, in particular, has been cited by UNICEF as one of Nigeria’s most improved states in primary school enrollment and child immunization coverage. Both states, despite grappling with insecurity, now outperform Kogi in human development indices. Kogi, by contrast, lingers in the bottom rungs. Its IGR in 2023 hovered around ₦23 billion, compared to Lagos’s ₦651 billion and even Osun’s ₦25 billion, despite Kogi’s mineral wealth. Its poverty headcount remains above 45%, with unemployment hovering near 32%, according to NBS figures.
The state’s Human Development Index (HDI) ranking has consistently remained among the bottom ten in Nigeria. Kogi should not be poor. The Ajaokuta Steel Complex alone, with over forty completed plants and facilities sprawling across 24,000 hectares, could employ hundreds of thousands and turn the state into Africa’s industrial heartbeat. Instead, it has remained a graveyard of rusting machines and broken dreams. Year after year, governments have announced plans for its revival, yet corruption and federal-state bickering ensure it remains idle.
Beyond steel, Kogi harbors Nigeria’s largest deposits of limestone, powering cement giants like Dangote in Obajana, where billions are made annually. Yet, the host communities sit in poverty, their roads riddled with potholes, their streams polluted, their youths unemployed. Coal in Ankpa, iron ore in Itakpe, fertile plains in Lokoja, cassava belts in Ogori-Magongo, these riches have not translated into better lives. Where wealth exists without wisdom, retrogression thrives. Kogi’s fiscal mismanagement reflects in its debt profile, which climbed to over ₦135 billion in 2024, without corresponding infrastructure to justify such borrowing.
Salaries of workers until recently are often delayed, pensions remain unpaid, and capital projects are poorly executed or abandoned midway. Few images capture Kogi’s underdevelopment as starkly as its water crisis. In Okene, Adavi, Okehi, and parts of Ajaokuta, pipe-borne water is still a mirage. Residents trek miles to streams, kegs strapped like infants to their backs, climbing hills and descending valleys. Schoolchildren, who should be in classrooms, spend hours fetching water before attending lessons, if at all.
This reality is tragic, considering Kogi sits on the banks of the Niger and Benue rivers, not to talk of Ekuku, Osara and Waterworks Dams. The state’s waterworks, many dating back to the 1970s, remain dilapidated. Projects promised in political manifestos rarely go beyond foundation stones. Thus, in 2025, a state that should export water to drier regions still drinks from streams like a 19th-century community.
Geography blessed Kogi with a unique position: it borders Nasarawa, Benue, Enugu, Anambra, Edo, Ondo, Ekiti, Kwara, Niger, and the Federal Capital Territory. This should make the state a natural hub for commerce, tourism, and transportation. Lokoja, its capital, once served as Nigeria’s colonial seat of power and should today rival Abuja in tourist attraction. But instead of leveraging this location, successive administrations have failed to build infrastructure that connects and markets Kogi. Its tourism sector lies in neglect: Mount Patti, the confluence of the Niger and Benue, and Lord Lugard’s colonial relics remain underdeveloped.
Highways in the Central Senatorial District still bear the names of governments before 1991, while modern roads remain rare. Where others turned location into wealth, Kogi squandered its advantage. Beyond corruption, Kogi’s politics is poisoned by unhealthy ethnic rivalries. The state is a tripod of Igala, Ebira, and Okun (Yoruba), but instead of harnessing diversity for development, it has bred suspicion, marginalization, and contest for domination. Projects are often abandoned because they are “owned” by the other group, appointments shared by ethnic arithmetic rather than merit. This rivalry explains why even within districts, progress is uneven.
In Kogi Central, most major roads and waterworks still trace their origin to the pre-creation days of the old Kwara State government. Thirty-four years later, the infrastructure that exists is a fading inheritance, not the fruit of new leadership. By every measurable index, the story is grim: over 45% of Kogi’s population lives below the poverty line; about 32% of youths are unemployed, compared to Jigawa’s 19%; the state has one of the lowest doctor-to-patient ratios, with less than one doctor per 5,000 people; WAEC ranking in 2023 placed Kogi in the bottom 15, far behind peers like Osun and Ebonyi; and many rural roads remain untarred, with inter-community travel still done on foot or motorcycles through bush paths.
At 34, Kogi should be a story of triumph. Instead, it is a warning of what happens when leadership fails. With its natural resources, strategic geography, and resilient people, the state should rival Lagos or Ogun in industry, Ebonyi in infrastructure, or Osun in education. But misgovernance, ethnic division, and corruption have chained it to mediocrity. The barefooted child on the hill with a keg is not just a victim of water scarcity; he is the portrait of a state that refuses to grow. His wounds tell of leaders who built personal mansions but neglected public works, who dug political trenches instead of water pipes, who sowed ethnic rivalry instead of unity. Kogi’s 34th anniversary, therefore, should not be draped in drums or fireworks. It should be marked with sober reflection, a collective cry for rescue, and a vow that the next decade will not repeat the mistakes of the last three. For if a state blessed with so much can waste so much, then its greatest tragedy is not what it lacks, but what it has refused to use.
– Ozumi Abdul is a journalist, writer and strategic communication expert. He can be reached via abdulozumi83@gmail.com
