By Yusuf, M.A., PhD.
The Facebook post titled “Muri Ajaka and the Path to Eternal Doom,” authored by an individual who identifies as John Paul on Facebook, is not political criticism in any serious sense of the term. It is political arson: a text saturated with resentment, ethnic self-denigration, historical erasure, and numerical illiteracy. It substitutes bile for evidence, metaphysics for analysis, and vendetta for strategy. Such writing does not merit indulgence. It requires forensic dismantling.
This response interrogates claims, not personalities, and proceeds on evidence, institutional logic, and verifiable electoral data.
There is a growing perception within Kogi political circles that the author of the Facebook post, John Paul—who is widely known as a supporter of Victor Alewo Adoji—appears to treat sustained criticism of Yakubu Murtala Ajaka as a political strategy rather than as substantive policy engagement.
Source: John Paul, “Muri Ajaka and the Path to Eternal Doom,” Facebook post.
Let us therefore proceed in the only manner befitting serious political inquiry: by returning to the record.
2015: Correcting the Historical Record
Kogi East did not “lose power” in 2015 by electoral rejection, betrayal, or incompetence. Prince Abubakar Audu won the 2015 governorship election. He was leading decisively when tragedy intervened. His death was not symbolic; it was a constitutional rupture that reset the entire electoral process. The political aftermath—elite fragmentation, strategic miscalculations, internal rivalries, and shifting state alliances—constituted a collective failure across parties and generations.
To erase Audu’s electoral victory in order to fabricate a narrative of “eternal doom” is not a misunderstanding of history; it is the deliberate falsification of it. Democracies require memory, and political communities that abandon memory for myth inevitably lose coherence and credibility.
The Metaphysics of “Eternal Doom”
“Eternal doom” does not belong to political analysis. It belongs to clerical theatrics. Democratic systems do not operate on curses, prophecies, or metaphysical condemnation. They operate on institutions, coalitions, incentives, and choices. Power shifts. Alliances realign. Fortunes turn.
When political actors invoke metaphysical damnation, it is often to evade accountability for strategic failure. If doom is eternal, no one must explain how alliances collapsed or how institutions were misread. Serious politics deals in plans, numbers, and alliances—not prophecies.
Scapegoating as Anti-Politics
The central deceit of the pamphlet is scapegoating. It compresses decades of elite failure into a single individual, His Excellency Yakubu Murtala Ajaka as though political outcomes are produced by personal will rather than institutional dynamics and collective elite behaviour. This is not analysis; it is ritual sacrifice.
If Kogi East has struggled politically, then governors, senators, party leaders, financiers, godfathers, and self-styled “elders” must submit themselves to scrutiny. Collective failure cannot be outsourced.
Democracy and the Myth of Unanimity
The pamphlet criminalises plural voting, presenting electoral diversity as evidence of betrayal. This betrays a profound misunderstanding of democratic practice. Plural outcomes are the norm in competitive politics. Disagreement is not treachery. Electoral diversity is not fraud.
To demand unanimity is to confess a totalitarian instinct fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
Certificates, Classism, and Institutional Logic
The fixation on academic credentials of His Excellency Yakubu Ajaka is not scrutiny; it is classist insinuation—the traditional refuge of weak politics. Facts dispose of this charade.
In 2023, His Excellency Yakubu Murtala Ajaka contested against a fortified incumbency that weaponised institutions with surgical precision. That machinery did not fault his certificates. It did not disqualify him. It did not secure a court order against him. The reason is straightforward: his credentials are valid and lodged with INEC Nigeria, where they are publicly verifiable.
The logic here is institutional and falsifiable. Had Ajaka’s credentials been defective, a fortified incumbency would have pursued disqualification through the courts without hesitation. Nigerian incumbents do not overlook such opportunities. The persistence of the certificate chorus is therefore not inquiry; it is self-therapy for political failure.
The Manufactured Messiah
No serious supporter has ever presented Ajaka as a messiah. That caricature is a straw man constructed to justify hostility. Ajaka’s own statements are instructive. He has consistently maintained that elections are decided by the people, not by intimidation, and that leadership is service, not entitlement. He has insisted that strength lies in unity across communities and strict obedience to the rule of law. These are not messianic claims; they are democratic axioms.
Politics is competition, not excommunication.
Ethnic Self-Denigration and Strategic Collapse
The pamphlet’s indulgence in ethnic self-flagellation—branding its own people as impotent and eternally fallen—is not realism. It is internalised inferiority masquerading as candour. No political community negotiates power by advertising its incapacity. Communities advance by projecting confidence, building coalitions, and negotiating leverage.
Abuja and the Dependency Mindset
The claim that “one phone call from the presidency” can extinguish a local political aspiration reflects a dependency mindset—a centre–periphery logic that has historically weakened subnational bargaining power in Nigeria. Political relevance is not conferred by whispers in Abuja. It is built at home through organisation, alliances, and voter mobilisation.
Ajaka has been unequivocal: no mandate is borrowed; it is earned from voters. That sentence alone dismantles the oracle politics of the pamphleteers.
The Igala Agenda Beyond Personalities
The Igala agenda is not the private franchise of any individual. It is a collective aspiration for inclusion, dignity, and relevance. If critics believe the agenda requires refinement, the appropriate response is to improve it—not to burn every platform that carries it.
Ajaka has articulated this clearly: the agenda must unite Igala, Bassa, Okun, and Ebira citizens around fairness and the rule of law. That is coalition politics, not parochialism.
Numbers and Political Reality
We now arrive at the point where rhetoric collapses under arithmetic.
In the 2023 governorship election, Yakubu Murtala Ajaka recorded 259,052 votes as an opposition candidate in Kogi State. This is not opinion. It is empirical, verifiable data. No opposition figure in Kogi’s political history has mobilised such numbers against an entrenched incumbency fortified by state power, resources, institutions, and coercive advantage.
A politician who compels an incumbent to rig openly—because subtlety fails—is not the contemporary of anonymous pamphleteers. Numbers terrify mediocrity. Votes expose imposture. This is why the attacks are hysterical. When critics abandon statistics for slander, it is because the numbers are undefeated.
What Serious Politics Requires
A serious political conversation would foreground structural questions rather than indulge vendetta:
How does Kogi East rebuild elite consensus after fragmentation?
What minimum programme can unite Igala, Bassa, Okun, and Ebira voters?
How are statewide alliances negotiated without self-sabotage?
How is demographic strength converted into strategic leverage?
The pamphlet answers none of these questions. It offers only rage.
Conclusion: Arithmetic Over Annihilation
Ajaka is not beyond criticism. No politician is. But criticism must be factual, proportional, and honest. What we have witnessed instead is a politics of poison—a vendetta dressed as ethnic concern, seeking annihilation where competition is required.
Kogi East does not need prophets of doom. It needs discipline of thought, unity of purpose, and strategic adulthood. If there are better candidates, let them emerge. If there are better ideas, let them compete. If there are better records, let them be examined.
But the politics of erasure—where one man must be destroyed for others to feel relevant—has never built a future.
Politics is arithmetic before it is emotion
And those who cannot defeat 259,052 votes should retire their insults and return to the classroom of strategy.
Case closed.
– Yusuf M.A., PhD
Senior Lecturer and Researcher
Democratic Governance, Constitutionalism, and Electoral Politics
Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Nigeria
