By Oshio Baba
There are politicians who seek office, and there are those who are possessed by a place. Senator Sunday Steve Karimi belongs to the second group. For him, Kogi West is not just a senatorial district on the map of Nigeria, it is home, it is heritage, it is a trust. And it is this love, fierce, open and unapologetic, that has now become the centre of the storm around him.
In recent weeks, the Senator representing Kogi West has found himself at the receiving end of threats, ultimatums, alleged plots to frustrate his campaign, and a court judgment nullifying his emergence as the APC candidate for the 2027 election, a judgment he has vowed to appeal. His supporters see all of this not as coincidence, but as a coordinated attempt to punish a man whose only offence is speaking for his people. His travails, they insist, began the moment he dared to ask a simple question that every citizen has a right to ask: if allocations have increased, where is the improvement in the lives of the people?
That question was asked innocently, in his own telling, during a town hall meeting in Anyigba, Dekina/Bassa Federal Constituency, organised under the Win With Tinubu/Shettima project to mobilise support for the re-election of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. Responding to a question on what the Federal Government was doing with the savings from fuel subsidy removal, Karimi explained that a substantial portion was being shared through statutory allocations to states and local governments, and that an average local government in Kogi now receives about N500 million monthly. “We shouldn’t be blaming everything on the Federal Government. A lot of savings have been made from fuel subsidy removal. We need to follow the utilisation of it. If those savings are transformed into better living conditions for our people, that would be okay,” he said.
It was, in substance, a defence of President Tinubu’s reforms and a call for accountability at the grassroots. Yet, according to reports, it triggered a backlash. The Chairman of Yagba West Local Government Council and Kogi State ALGON Chairman, Hon. Tosin Olokun, was alleged to have declared “total war” against the Senator at a meeting in Egbe, vowed to frustrate his campaign across the seven local government areas, threatened to compile a list of appointees sympathetic to Karimi for removal, and threatened arrest of supporters circulating information on council allocations. Those allegations have not been independently confirmed, and no response from Olokun was contained in the reports, but the tension they generated was real, and youths reportedly took to the streets of Egbe chanting pro-Karimi slogans and vowing to defend their Senator against intimidation.
Soon after, a seven-day ultimatum was reportedly issued by the Kogi West APC Zonal Chairman, Hon. Emmanuel Ayo Aledare, asking Senator Karimi to tender an unreserved public apology to Governor Ahmed Usman Ododo over alleged accusations against the state government. Supporters of the Senator responded that speaking out, raising concerns and demanding accountability should not automatically be interpreted as rebellion, and that a zonal chairman does not by virtue of his position alone possess the unilateral authority to expel an elected senator. They argued that if Karimi alleged that certain appointees were working against him, the appropriate response should be an impartial investigation rather than an immediate demand for an apology. For them, his alleged offence was simply his insistence on justice, fairness, equity and political inclusiveness for the people of Kogi West ahead of 2027, and his belief that the people deserve a fair opportunity to determine their political future without intimidation, manipulation or undue interference.
Then came the courtroom. A Federal High Court judgment in Suit No. FHC/LKJ/CS/63/2026 nullified the APC’s submission of Karimi’s name to INEC and ordered the party to replace him with Samuel Bamidele Aro, holding that the APC primary conducted on May 18, 2026, which produced Aro, was the valid exercise monitored by INEC. Karimi, in a personally signed statement, described the judgment as contrary to the evidence before the court, alleged that the trial judge departed from his own previous rulings on statute of limitations in pre-election cases and on the proper authority to conduct party primaries, and alleged that Aro did not participate in the primary but submitted fabricated documents. “I wish to state that this incident is the handiwork of the state’s rulers, who have been desperate and relentless in their efforts to persecute me and protect their grip on Kogi State’s resources, an issue I have spoken out against,” he said. He vowed to exercise his constitutional right of appeal, declaring, “I remain strong and undeterred, and my campaign continues with renewed zeal and vigour. My detractors do not love our party or Mr President. I remain Mr President’s number-one supporter in Kogi State.”
Through all of this, what has sustained Karimi is not structure alone, but something no backdoor effort can manufacture: organic followership. It is the followership of students who have received his bursaries, of mothers who now fetch water from a borehole near their homes, of traders whose cooperatives received support, of youths who got federal jobs, of communities whose roads are returning to life, and of traditional rulers who have watched him show up, listen, and return. When he toured Kogi West recently, from town hall meetings with youths and women in Kabba-Bunu to homage to revered traditional rulers including the Elejuku of Ejuku, the Oba of Ife-Olukotun, the Agbana of Isanlu and the Oba of Odoolu in Kabba, and to Ilafin, Ejuku and Ayere, residents trooped out not because they were mobilised by money, but because they recognised a man who has kept showing up.
That recognition is rooted in a record that even critics concede is hard to match on delivery. As a ranking senator and Chairman of the Senate Committee on Services, Karimi, the first man from Yagba to reach the Senate since 1999 and a former two-term House of Representatives member, has turned access and influence into visible projects across all seven local government areas. His education footprint has become the largest personal intervention in Kogi State in recent history, not funded from constituency projects but from his own resources through the Sunday Steve Karimi Education Foundation and Tinubu Support Group. It began in 2024 with N100 million for 1,000 students in Kogi West at N100,000 each, grew in 2025 to N300 million for 3,000 students across the state, and in August 2026 a third edition of another N300 million was opened, bringing his total commitment to N700 million for over 4,000 students in three years.
That investment in people is matched by infrastructure that communities can see and touch. He facilitated N2 billion for the rehabilitation of the abandoned Kabba-Egbe road and secured an additional N6 billion from the Minister of Works to ensure the contractor returned to site after eleven years of abandonment, and captured N3 billion in the 2025 budget for the Iluhagba-Mopa-Isanlu-Egbe federal road with CGC now mobilised. Where the Pakuta Bridge linking Aiyegunle Gbede, Kiri Kingdom, Kupa North and South and parts of Niger State had collapsed and cut off economic life, he funded its reconstruction. He facilitated the remodelling of Government Science Secondary School, Koton-Karfe, valued at over N1.2 billion, the single biggest educational infrastructure ever attracted to Kogi West by a sitting legislator, and transformed the old library at Titcombe College, Egbe, his alma mater, into a modern solar-powered Computer-Based Test Centre at over N350 million with 288-seater capacity that hosted over 1,200 JAMB candidates, with three more CBT centres secured for Muslim Community Secondary School, Lokogoma in Lokoja, Government Science School, Iyara in Ijumu, and Okutadudu Comprehensive College, Odo-Ere in Yagba West, and a fourth at ECWA Secondary School, Mopa, being personally funded by him.
Across Kogi West, the story extends to over 85 solar-powered boreholes and more than 140 rehabilitated boreholes, transformers for Sarki Noma, Mount Patti, Obajana and Agbadu, rehabilitated transformers at Offege-Baptist and Koton-Karfe, solar streetlights in over 500 communities, a cottage hospital at Edu-Kakanda, Lokoja, built and awaiting equipping, erosion control, drainage and bridge projects in Ilafin and Ejuku that saved communities from annual flooding and isolation, and support for 50 women cooperatives with N100 million in funding, alongside business support for over 500 traders in Lokoja and 1,000 traders across the district. On security, when kidnappers turned the Kogi-Kwara border into a corridor of fear, he put N750 million of personal resources on the line and fully built, furnished and equipped a 94-bed military Forward Operating Base in Egbe, complete with accommodation, armory, solar and generator power, donated two brand new Hilux patrol vans, and facilitated deployment of troops to Jege, Odo-Ere, Isanlu and Olle-Bunu, an intervention commissioned by the Chief of Army Staff on October 12, 2024, after the rescue of CUSTECH kidnapped students near Egbe, and which earned him national recognition as the Most Security-Conscious Senator in Nigeria. On the floor of the Senate, he has sponsored over 10 bills and moved more than 30 motions, including the Central Bank of Nigeria Amendment Bill 2023 aimed at barring the CBN Governor and deputies from partisan politics, and a motion that triggered scrutiny of the N11.35 trillion reportedly spent on refinery maintenance between 2010 and 2024.
Why then, his supporters ask, would such a man be targeted? Their answer is simple: because love, when it is genuine, is threatening to those who profit from silence. Karimi’s love is not performative. It is the love that spends personal money when government money is slow, that builds a military base when insecurity threatens his people, that pays school fees when parents cannot, that lobbies ministers in Abuja and then returns to the village to inspect the work himself. It is the love that refuses to keep quiet when his people are hungry in the midst of plenty, and refuses to trade the interest of Kogi West for temporary peace with power.
Time and season, his supporters believe, will vindicate that passion. History has a way of separating noise from substance, and of remembering who stood when it was costly to stand. The ultimatums will fade, the court battles will be decided on appeal, the political seasons will pass, but the schools will remain, the roads will remain, the boreholes will remain, the bursaries will have produced graduates, and the Forward Operating Base will still be standing guard over Egbe. In the end, Kogi West will judge not by who shouted loudest in a season of politics, but by who delivered in a season of need.
For Senator Karimi, that judgment is already being written in the hearts of his people, in the classrooms of Koton-Karfe, in the CBT centre in Egbe, in the markets lit by solar lights, and in the voices of youths who took to the streets not for money, but for a man they believe loves them. His love for his people is not a crime. No backdoor effort, no ultimatum, no threat, no courtroom manoeuvre, will be enough to silence Kogi West.
– Oshio Baba writes from Lokoja.
