Every injustice has a lifespan sustained by silence. It survives not because it is persuasive, but because it is familiar. People endure it, rationalise it, and eventually learn to call it normal. But history has a habit of interrupting convenience. When truth is denied a voice for too long, it returns with receipts.
That interruption happened on Kabba Cultural Day.
Distinguished Senator Sunday Steve Karimi did not arrive with fire. He came with memory. He did not raise his voice; he raised a mirror. And what unsettled Kogi State was not rhetoric, but recognition.
Speaking plainly before his people, Karimi stated a fact so obvious it had become taboo: since the creation of Kogi State in 1991, Kogi West has never produced an elected governor.
This was not polemic.
It was documentation.
In uttering it aloud, Karimi did not create grievance; he stripped injustice of its camouflage. And daylight, as history teaches us, is lethal to systems that depend on amnesia.
He went further, still without theatrics. He stated that Kogi West is working with Kogi East in preparation for the 2027 governorship election. No ambition was proclaimed. No candidate was named. Yet the political establishment convulsed.
Why?
Because the problem was never noise.
The problem was arithmetic.
In every society where power resists moral appeal, numbers eventually take over. Numbers do not plead. They do not threaten. They simply insist.
And the numbers in Kogi are stubborn.
Since 1991, Kogi East has governed for about nineteen years under elected civilian administrations. Kogi Central has governed for roughly ten years. Kogi West has governed for zero.
Not one year.
Not one term.
Not even a trial run.
Nineteen. Ten. Zero.
This is not emotion.
It is architecture.
To understand the depth of this imbalance, one must step outside today’s talking points and walk into history. The land now known as Kogi West formed the nucleus of the old Kabba Province—an administrative hub long before Kogi State was conceived. When colonial and post-colonial boundaries shifted between Kwara, Benue-Plateau, and eventually Kogi, Kabba Province provided the institutional skeleton upon which the new state was assembled.
The irony is brutal: the province that midwifed the state was permanently excluded from leading it.
When exclusion persists across generations, it stops looking accidental and begins to look engineered.
Trace the lineage without sentiment. Of the three major divisions of old Kabba Province—Kabba (Okun), Lokoja, and Kotonkarfe—only Kogi West has never produced a governor. Not in Kwara State. Not in Benue State. Not in Kogi State. Power migrated. Offices relocated. Leadership circulated.
Only the West remained immobile—spectators in a state they helped found.
Igala land did not produce a governor in old Benue State, but once Kogi was created, it governed for nearly two decades. The Ebira, once political companions of today’s Kogi West in Kwara State, governed there and have since held power in Kogi Central for about ten years.
Power followed them.
Opportunity accompanied them.
Only Kogi West was left behind.
In 2016, when power shifted from Igala to Ebira, many believed the arc of history would finally bend westward. Instead, succession collapsed inward—not merely to Kogi Central, but to a single local government, Okene, repeatedly. What began as imbalance hardened into concentration. What was once coincidence became routine.
As political wisdom reminds us: when power rotates within one compound, it is no longer rotation; it is possession.
This was the deeper truth Karimi placed on the table in Kabba. Not angrily. Not emotionally. But firmly. He reminded the state that injustice is not only about who governs, but about who is permanently denied even the possibility of governance. That democracy is not merely the conduct of elections, but the equitable circulation of opportunity among those who constitute the state.
Once this truth was spoken, silence lost its utility.
Across Kogi East—particularly among young people—the message resonated. They did not hear incitement; they heard respect. They heard partnership, not patronage. They heard an invitation to co-author the future, not serve as footnotes to it.
This is how injustice begins to collapse: when silence is no longer inherited.
The question now echoing across Kogi is unavoidable: how did a minority of local governments come to monopolise the destiny of an entire state for so long? This question is not driven by envy. It is driven by democratic logic. Numbers do not negotiate—they demand explanation.
Karimi did not invent the question.
He normalised asking it.
That is what unsettled the establishment. Injustice can withstand protest; it falters before coordination. It can manage noise; it fears alignment. The emerging Kogi East–Kogi West understanding is therefore not rebellion—it is democratic correction.
At the grassroots, the message is direct: if you do not command the numbers, stop playing alone. Use the time you have to govern well. Build legacies, not quarrels. This is not insult; it is counsel—and it is counsel Karimi has offered consistently, without venom.
The power of his intervention lies not in aggression, but in clarity. He reactivated memory. He laid bare arithmetic. He introduced balance into a political space long governed by evasion.
And so we return to first principles.
States do not decay because of loud enemies, but because of quiet habits left unexamined. Injustice rarely announces itself with violence; it arrives politely, settles comfortably, and names itself tradition. For years, Kogi called it normal.
Normality ended the day memory woke up.
On Kabba Cultural Day, one man spoke. He did not insult the house. He pointed to its foundation and asked why one pillar had never been allowed to bear weight. That question required no shouting—only honesty. And honesty, once released, does not retreat.
From that day, Kogi began to move—not because it was attacked, but because it was remembered. The young began to count.
The elders began to recall. And power, sensing that silence had lost its grip, began to pace restlessly.
As the saying goes, when truth is finally named, even lies lose their sleep.
Kogi now stands not at the edge of chaos, but at the threshold of choice: between explaining injustice or correcting it; between managing silence or answering history; between hoarding power or justifying it fairly.
History does not seek permission.
It only asks questions—and it keeps asking.
And when a people learn to count their years, remember their origins, and speak without fear, the question is no longer whether change will come, but how long resistance can survive it.
History is patient.
Truth is stubborn.
And numbers, once spoken aloud, do not forget.
— Yusuf M.A.
For: Kogi Equity Alliance
