There are moments in public life when exaggeration crosses a line and becomes historical malpractice. Richard Asaje’s description of Yahaya Bello as the “Architect of Modern Kogi State” is one such moment. It is not merely rhetorical excess; it is a strategic misreading of reality. And in politics, as Sun Tzu warned centuries ago, those who misjudge the terrain before battle have already lost.
Architecture implies design, structure, and durability. Modernity implies measurable improvement in human welfare, institutional capacity, and public trust. These are not matters of sentiment or loyalty; they are outcomes. And outcomes, as James Carville would bluntly insist, cannot be spun away. People may forget speeches, but they never forget unpaid salaries, dying retirees, or a capital city without water.
In geopolitics, Ian Bremmer reminds us that power is best assessed not by noise or personality but by institutions that work, legitimacy that endures, and systems that survive leadership change. By those standards, Kogi did not modernize during the Bello years. It destabilized—economically, administratively, and morally.
Let us set aside mythology and return to record.
Kogi became the first state in Nigeria where a serving director in the public service reportedly took his own life because he could no longer provide for his family. That tragedy did not occur in isolation. It was the human face of a governing philosophy that normalized deprivation. A modern state does not produce despair as policy. When it does, the failure is not accidental; it is systemic.
For nearly eight years, approximately 70 percent of Kogi’s workforce received about 40 percent of their earned salaries. This was not during war, sanctions, or fiscal collapse, but under routine governance with steady federal inflows. Gratuities became an unspeakable subject. Retirees—men and women who had given the best years of their lives to public service—died quietly in their homes. In other states, pensions were debated, audited, and paid. In Kogi, even asking questions was treated as insubordination.
Career progression was frozen into punishment. Civil servants stagnated on salary grade levels for close to a decade. Officers who should be on Grade Level 14 today are still paid as if they were on Grade Level 10 since the Wada Idris era. Promotion letters arrived without financial effect. Authority was decoupled from responsibility; hope was reduced to paperwork.
Governance itself became adversarial. Endless screenings and verification exercises turned public servants into suspects. The state ceased to treat its workforce as human capital and began managing them as liabilities. As Professor Chidi Odinkalu has long argued, constitutional democracy collapses where the state systematically breaks its social contract with citizens. Kogi’s experience fits that diagnosis with painful precision.
What passed for achievement during this period increasingly existed not in completed infrastructure or functioning systems, but in catalogues, slogans, billboards, and commissioning speeches. Physical governance gave way to graphic design. One flyover was elevated into a civilisational milestone and endlessly recycled as proof of statewide development. When a single interchange is asked to substitute for salaries, pensions, hospitals, schools, and water, it ceases to be infrastructure and becomes a rhetorical crutch.
Then came the even grander claims. We were told that Kogi had become Nigeria’s largest rice exporter, courtesy of the Omi Rice Mill. The mill itself deserves honest reckoning—not as an achievement, but as a metaphor. Announced with the language of industrial transformation, it was paraded as proof of economic revolution. In practice, it functioned more as a talking point than a value chain, more ceremony than supply, more headline than harvest.
Serious economies are not built on commissioning speeches. They are judged by throughput, jobs created, market penetration, and verifiable export data. On those hard metrics, the rice-exporter narrative did not merely weaken—it collapsed into absurdity. It was amplified loudly, interrogated rarely, and quietly abandoned once reality arrived. As Sun Tzu warned, deception survives only until it encounters facts. The rice mill did not fail because critics mocked it; it failed because nothing substantive ever followed the spectacle.
Then there is Lokoja—the capital.
Former Governor Ibrahim Idris left behind a functioning public water system, popularly known as IBRO Water. Today, Lokoja has been reduced to Mairuwa. Residents buy water by the jerrycan; public taps exist only in memory. A state capital without running water is not modern, it is a textbook case of regression. Little wonder that independent assessments have repeatedly ranked Kogi among the dirtiest states in the country. Yet in the face of this documented collapse, Asaje’s verbal diarrhea still insists on crowning Yahaya Bello the “Architect of Modern Kogi State”—a claim so detached from lived reality that it reads less like opinion and more like deliberate insult.
If Kogi were truly modern, the evidence would be irresistible. Presidents would arrive without persuasion to commission projects. Investors would speak louder than praise-singers. So let us ask the simplest questions: how many projects did President Muhammadu Buhari come to commission in Kogi? How many has President Bola Ahmed Tinubu commissioned—despite the enormous allocations flowing to both the state and its local governments?
Clausewitz taught that legitimacy is the center of gravity of any political system. Once legitimacy erodes, force and propaganda cannot compensate. Modernity does not hide from inspection; it invites it.
What actually emerged during this period was concentration—the steady capture of common patrimony by less than five percent of the population. The underprivileged, the downtrodden, the hurt, and the impoverished were permitted to cry, but never to talk. Silence was enforced not only by law, but by fear. Suffering was normalized; dissent was criminalized. As Farooq Kperogi has repeatedly warned, when power converts criticism into treason, it is not strength on display but deep insecurity.
This is not an ethnic argument. It is a governance argument. But when power, access, and privilege consistently align along narrow lines, citizens will name what they experience. A state ceases to feel like a shared project when inclusion becomes selective and justice appears conditional.
There is also a reason this debate cannot be settled by praise alone: the law has entered the conversation. Modern governance is ultimately tested not by loyalty statements but by audits, investigations, and due process. Allegations surrounding the Bello years are not inventions of critics; they are matters before institutions empowered by the Constitution—anti-corruption agencies, auditors, and the courts. In serious democracies, leaders are neither exonerated by applause nor condemned by noise. They are assessed by forensic accounting, procurement records, and judicial findings. Those who insist on sainthood should welcome transparent audits, not resist them. If the record is as spotless as claimed, due process will say so. Until then, rhetoric cannot override investigation, and propaganda cannot substitute for accountability.
Sun Tzu warned that leaders who confuse performance with victory invite defeat. Kogi was governed as spectacle: billboards before budgets, titles before truth, announcements before outcomes. Clausewitz would recognize the pattern instantly—politics pursued without regard for consequences eventually collapses under its own contradictions.
Every failed system commits one final error: it lies to the next generation. By declaring collapse as modernity, advocates of this narrative do not merely insult memory; they sabotage recovery. No serious reform can begin on a falsified baseline. States that misdiagnose their failures inevitably repeat them.
Those who benefited from this order may congratulate themselves. Those who escaped its consequences may celebrate their freedom from daily pain. But a word of caution is in order: do not despise those still trapped in the wreckage. They may lack the instruments of power, but they possess something more enduring—memory, faith, and time. History teaches that God does not require weapons to confront injustice.
Calling this era modern is not praise. It is provocation.
Kogi does not need saints. It needs audits. It does not need architects of illusion, but engineers of repair. No society has ever rebuilt itself by applauding its ruins.
History is unforgiving to false titles. It strips away noise and preserves facts. And facts, stubborn, unsentimental, and patient, are the ultimate architects of truth.
— Yusuf M.A.
Kogi Equity Alliance
Strategic Communications Directorate Policy, Governance, and Accountability Desk
Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
