There are many ways to destroy a state. Some do it with war. Others do it with debt. Kogi State has chosen a quieter but more lethal method: the deliberate criminalisation of local governance through the elevation of thuggery to public office. When intimidation becomes a qualification for leadership and violence is rewarded with authority, the state does not merely misgovern itself; it repudiates the very idea of governance as a constitutional, moral, and civic enterprise.
The Local Government is the first classroom of democracy. It is where citizens first encounter the state not as abstraction but as service—where roads are graded, health centres staffed, water supplied, and trust either earned or squandered. Nigeria’s Constitution recognises this by guaranteeing Local Government as a tier of governance, not as a private franchise of governors or godfathers. What it did not envisage—what it could not have imagined—is a system where councils are run like motor parks and chairmanship is treated as compensation for political muscle.
This degeneration did not happen by accident. Thuggery thrives in Kogi because it is cheaper than competence. It requires no ideas, no preparation, no professional discipline—only loyalty and a willingness to intimidate. When politics becomes a transaction of muscle-for-access, governance is reduced to a protection racket funded by public money. Brains are expensive; thugs are disposable. Kogi’s political class has made its choice, and the state is paying the price.
The consequences are visible everywhere. Billions of naira flow monthly into Local Government coffers from FAAC, yet councils across the state are development graveyards. No functional primary healthcare centres. No sustainable rural roads. No water schemes. No accountability. This is not a mystery. You cannot extract policy from men trained in coercion rather than administration. You cannot demand planning from those whose only skill is enforcement. A thug does not become an administrator by wearing a title; he merely gains access to public resources. Every naira handed to a thug-run council is a tax on poverty, a subsidy for violence, and a theft from development.
More troubling is the method by which these actors are installed. Sitting Local Government chairmen whose tenure has not expired are hurriedly removed or replaced through executive fiat. This is not reform; it is evidence management. When governments rush to reshuffle councils before tenure ends, they are not improving efficiency—they are erasing footprints. This is how compromised systems bury accountability: change the faces before the questions arrive.
Nowhere is this moral inversion clearer than in Lokoja. Political structures previously implicated in acts of violence are not sanctioned; they are rewarded. Violence is promoted to qualification. Brutality is baptised as leadership. The message to society is unmistakable: education is optional; intimidation is profitable. A society that rewards thuggery is not just miseducating its youth; it is training them to despise learning and worship violence. This is how states lose a generation—not to war, but to moral collapse.
The collapse reaches its most obscene point when an individual publicly implicated in the brutalisation of a sitting Senator within the precincts of Government House is neither investigated nor prosecuted but instead rewarded with appointment as a Local Government chairman. That single act captures the full pathology of Kogi’s crisis. When violence against a constitutionally elected federal legislator attracts promotion rather than punishment, the state crosses from misgovernance into moral anarchy. This is not merely the normalisation of thuggery; it is its canonisation. A government that rewards the assault of a Senator announces, without embarrassment, that no one is protected by law and that public office is the prize for intimidation. That is the anatomy of state failure.
Appointing a Local Government chairman who exists to serve the narrow interests of one individual rather than the collective interests of the state is not merely bad governance; it is an assault on the integrity of public administration. Handpicked proxies lacking independence, competence, and accountability inevitably compromise institutional processes and convert Local Governments into private outposts of personal power. This is intolerable. At a moment when substantial public funds continue to flow into Local Government accounts, Kogi cannot afford leadership captured by loyalty to individuals rather than responsibility to citizens. The state requires representatives with intellectual depth, professional expertise, and administrative capacity to manage public resources and deliver development—not political thugs whose primary function is enforcement.
The tragedy of Kogi becomes even starker when placed beside Borno State. Borno has endured over a decade of insurgency, mass displacement, and institutional trauma. Yet, in rebuilding its Local Governments, Borno deliberately appointed Professors, PhD holders, and seasoned technocrats as caretakers and council leaders. A state that has buried thousands still understands a truth Kogi has chosen to abandon: reconstruction requires intellect. Even under existential threat, Borno invests in minds. Kogi, under no such siege, invests in muscle.
This comparison dismantles the lazy argument that “street control” is governance. Security challenges do not justify thuggery; they demand deeper competence. Borno’s example proves that even in the harshest conditions, leadership can still be entrusted to thinkers rather than enforcers—if the state is serious about survival.
There is also a grave security implication Kogi’s political actors appear unwilling to confront. Local Governments are the first line of internal security. When they are captured by thugs, the state manufactures insecurity from the grassroots. Thuggery today becomes banditry tomorrow. Intimidation today becomes insurgency tomorrow. A government that teaches its political class that violence is the currency of power should not be surprised when violence returns to collect its debt.
At the constitutional level, the damage is equally profound. Arbitrary interference with Local Government tenure mocks federalism and empties the rule of law of meaning. The Supreme Court has been unequivocal: elected councils are not the personal property of governors. Democracy does not collapse only when elections are rigged; it collapses when the institutions meant to serve citizens are handed to men who terrorise them.
For Kogi West, this crisis rests atop a longer injustice. For 33 years, the zone has been denied the governorship. But for nearly a decade, the entire state—East, West, and Central—has been denied intellectual leadership. The tragedy is no longer sectional; it is civilisational. Kogi is not merely marginalising a zone; it is marginalising competence itself.
A government that installs thugs as chairmen forfeits the moral authority to preach law and order. It cannot criminalise violence it has already promoted. It cannot demand obedience to laws it routinely violates. It cannot claim legitimacy while governing through fear.
What happens in Kogi does not end in Kogi. When one state normalises criminal governance, it lowers the democratic threshold for the entire federation. Bad behaviour, when rewarded, metastasises. Once thuggery becomes governance, reform becomes rebellion—and the state pays a far higher price to undo what it cheaply installed.
The remedy is simple and lawful: investigate, prosecute, recover funds, and disqualify—anything less is complicity. Local Government leadership should meet minimum public standards—education, experience, asset declaration, and a clean security record—before appointment or election.
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Kogi still has a choice. It can continue down this path and become a permanent cautionary tale, or it can arrest this descent and restore Local Government to its constitutional purpose. That choice begins with rejecting thuggery as qualification, insisting on competence as a minimum standard, auditing public funds without fear, and ending the culture of political intimidation.
The Kogi Equity Alliance (KEA) is right to insist that this culture must be destroyed, not managed; dismantled, not recycled. Thuggery has no place in governance. Fear is not leadership. History will not ask who wielded power in Kogi; it will ask who defended the idea that power must answer to law. And states are not destroyed by enemies alone; they are destroyed when criminals are invited to govern them.
— Kogi Equity Alliance (KEA)
Because equity is not a favour; it is the foundation of a just state
