Why Fairness Cannot Wait: Kogi West, Kogi East, and the Meaning of 2027
— Yusuf, M. A.,
There comes a moment in the life of a state when silence is no longer neutral, it becomes complicity. Kogi has reached that threshold. The recent claims alleging that the voter population of Kogi East was “inflated” at state creation, and that governorship should remain anchored in one Local Government until 2031, are not mere political remarks. They constitute an attempt to redraw the moral foundations of our state.
Kogi was not created for one group to overshadow others.
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Kogi was never intended to be governed as a property passed from one favored hand to another.
Kogi is not inheritance; it is a commonwealth, a state held in trust by all its peoples.
Between 1999 and 2016, Kogi East held the governorship. Yet power did not stagnate.
It rotated internally: Ofu to Omala to Dekina.
This internal rotation served as a stabilizing mechanism. Balance was maintained. Cohesion survived.
Today, we are being asked to accept a very different pattern.
Eight years from Okene have elapsed, and there is now an expectation of an additional eight years from the same Local Government.
This is not power rotation, it is the captivity of political authority disguised as continuity.
This is not equity, it is entitlement presented as inevitability.
Let us speak without disguise, without fear, and without political courtesy:
Kogi West has never held the governorship, not once since the state was created.
No society can attain durable unity while a major component of its identity has never been entrusted with leadership responsibility.
When His Excellency Yakubu Murtala Ajaka raised this truth, he did not speak as a representative of Kogi East. He spoke as a custodian of the state’s collective dignity.
He stated openly on national television, that if power were justly shifted to Kogi West, he would stand down and mobilize his constituency in support.
That was not political maneuvering. It was statesmanship.
It was the moral clarity of a leader who chooses fairness above ambition.
Today, some of the very actors who dismissed that call for justice now seek endorsements from the Okun traditional institution, urging continuity under the same Local Government.
But the political reality is already settled:
Kogi East holds the numbers. Kogi West holds the justice.
And when numbers and justice converge, no entrenched power structure survives unchallenged.
2027, therefore, is not a contest of ethnicity, personality, or party identity.
It is a referendum on the soul of Kogi State.
The questions before us are fundamental:
Will we choose unity or exclusion? Will we choose fairness or imbalance?
Will we choose a shared state or a privatized territory?
Those who resist rotation often resist accountability.
Those who challenge fairness challenge the idea of belonging. Efforts to question long-established population patterns are not strategies of unity, they are preparations for exclusion.
But the state is no longer politically naive.
Kogi’s citizens are no longer passive spectators; they have become active interpreters of power.
They see. They remember. They will respond.
And the collective voice of the state is increasingly clear:
Power must rotate.
Not eventually.
Not symbolically.
But meaningfully and now.
Kogi West does not require charity.
Kogi East does not seek dominance.
Kogi Central cannot be erased.
What this state requires is balance, the foundation of legitimacy.
Ajaka understood this early, and he bore the cost of saying so at a time when it was neither convenient nor popular.
But time has done what time always does:
History has finally aligned with reality, and it now recalls who stood on the side of fairness when it carried the highest personal price.
2027 is not merely another election. It represents correction, restoration, and the rebalancing of trust.
It is how Kogi rebuilds shared ownership of its political identity.
And no coalition built upon justice has ever been defeated.
