By: Aondoakaa Tersugh Daniel

Ahead of 2027, the Peoples Democratic Party occupies a serious strategic position in Benue, anchored by the emergence of Chief Michael Kaase Aondoakaa as its gubernatorial flag bearer. That much is considerable. But the declaration of a running mate without proper consultation, without recourse to the electoral history of the zone, and without regard for the arithmetic of bloc politics within Zone C reduces what could have been a formidable campaign to a cosmetic exercise in political dressing. Aondoakaa has not launched a campaign. He has launched a rehearsal for defeat.

The pattern is not new. It has played out before, and it has always ended the same way. In 2003, two major opposition parties contesting against incumbent Governor George Akume pitched their running mates within the Old Otukpo bloc of Benue South, while Akume retained his deputy from the Old Oju bloc. The stakeholders of the UNPP would later collapse their party structure in support of the ANPP, yet Unongo of the ANPP still lost to Akume. The consolidation of opposition forces meant nothing because the foundational error of running mate selection had already been made. For the records, Unongo’s running mate was Philip Daniel Agbondien.

In 2011, Prof. Steve Ugbah picked Alhaji Usman Abubakar, widely known as the Young Alhaji, as his running mate in the governorship race. Yet, Young Alhaji’s popularity in Otukpo couldn’t deliver. Prof. Ugbah lost that race.

In 2019, Barr. Emmanuel Jime picked Dr. Sam Ode as his running mate. Ode hails from Old Otukpo. At the time of that contest, the incumbent deputy governor, Engr Benson Abuonu equally hailed from Old Otukpo. That ticket failed.

The elections of 2003, 2011, and 2019 were fierce electioneering years in which incumbents were seriously challenged. All three opposition tickets carried real political capital. None survived the weight of a miscalculated running mate choice. Aondoakaa now finds himself in the same fight, challenging an incumbent, and he has reached into the same cabinet of failure for his formula. One would have expected that strategic ambition would produce strategic alliance. It has not. A deliberate thinker preparing to govern a state does not repeat the exact configuration that has ended in defeat across three separate electoral cycles within the same zone.

The most fitting choice, by every measure of the current power equation in Benue South, was from the Old Oju bloc. The reasoning is not sentiment. It is arithmetic. The Idoma bloc presently holds the Senate, the deputy speakership and the deputy governorship. Old Oju, by contrast, has no stake in the current power sharing arrangement across the zone. That is not a minor recipe for grievance. It is a political vacuum waiting to be filled by any candidate with the sense to see it.

Beyond the question of equity, there is the question of voting population. Many analysts overestimate Otukpo’s raw electoral advantage by conflating geographical size with actual turnout capacity. As it is in Makurdi, where settler populations and non-indigene residents constitute a substantial portion of the population without translating into corresponding votes for indigene candidates, so too must the voting population of Otukpo be disaggregated carefully. A very significant portion of the real electoral weight in that terrain belongs to the Igede people of Old Oju, whose votes are not automatic and are not captive to sentiment.

Aondoakaa’s decision to pick a running mate from Old Otukpo, a bloc with no significant political capital to deploy in this contest, is not merely a tactical misstep. It is the first clear sign that his campaign does not understand the zone it intends to govern. Anyone who is willing to forfeit the entire bloc votes of Old Oju and walk the same road that destroyed the aspirations of Unongo, Ugbah and Jime will arrive at the same destination those roads have always led to. History in Benue South does not punish repetition lightly. It completes the full circle, and the circle always closes at total defeat.

Those who argue that the choice confers some security advantage, given the background of the running mate, may have conveniently forgotten that Vice President Kashim Shettima declared at the outset of the Tinubu administration that the President would focus on development and economic matters while he himself would lead the charge against insecurity. The Nigerian public was invited to accept that division of labour. The state of security in Nigeria today is the most definitive verdict on that arrangement.

A question that should bother the engineers of this choice, and those who intend to vote come 2027, is this: in the event of an emergency, can this unknown running mate, who knows little or nothing about the Benue terrain, steer the affairs of the state effectively?

Aondoakaa has taken the first step to defeat, and the election has not yet begun.

By Celphas Iyorhen

Rotimi Amaechi made a sarcastic remark last week, suggesting that asking Nasir El-Rufai to produce his late parents’ bodies as bail surety would not have been entirely out of place. His political ally meant it as a complaint for excessive bail conditions. The rest of Nigeria should take it as a dark and fitting metaphor, because the man now crying foul behind courtroom walls is the same man who spent two decades making others weep at the ruins of their homes, the graves of their kings, and the unmarked holes where their missing loved ones vanished without trace.

Let us be precise about who Nasir El-Rufai is.
As FCT Minister under Obasanjo, El-Rufai earned the nickname “Mai Rusau,” meaning the demolisher, after presiding over one of the most brutal forced eviction campaigns in Nigerian urban history, displacing nearly one million Abuja residents between 2003 and 2007. When asked about it, he said he had “no apology.” That unapologetic arrogance was not a phase. It was a governing philosophy he carried everywhere he went.
A 2008 Senate Committee found that El-Rufai, as FCT Minister, had violated multiple court orders in demolishing properties in Abuja.

Among the casualties of Elrufai draconian rules was Gbagyi Villa, where 3,500 homes, 40 churches, and 16 schools were flattened in defiance of a court injunction, with eight people reportedly killed in a demolition exercise conducted 72 hours before his tenure ended. The Durbar Hotel was similarly bulldozed while litigation was still active in court. A Kaduna High Court later ruled that demolition illegal. The damage, as always with El-Rufai, was already done before justice could catch up.

In 2017, an Abuja High Court ordered his government to pay Audu Maikori, founder of Chocolate City, N40 million in damages for unlawful arrest and detention. El-Rufai refused. The Court of Appeal affirmed the judgment in 2020 and reduced the award to N10.5 million. El-Rufai refused again and pushed the matter to the Supreme Court, where it sits till today. This is the same man who now hopes on courts for protection.

The blood on his hands is not a figure of speech. In December 2015, hundreds of Shiite members of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria were killed across three days in Zaria and reportedly buried in shallow graves at Mando, Kaduna, all under El-Rufai’s watch as governor. Charges were then filed against their imprisoned leader Sheikh El-Zakzaky even after three of his sons had already been killed in that same crackdown. Their leader spent years in detention. El-Rufai spent those same years governing freely.

Then there is the Agom Adara. In October 2018, the paramount ruler of the Adara people, HRH Dr. Maiwada Raphael Galadima, attended a government meeting in Kaduna and never returned home. His convoy was attacked on the way back. He was kidnapped and murdered despite a ransom payment. In the aftermath, El-Rufai ordered the arrest of nine Adara elders including traditional village heads, who were locked up for over 143 days without bail and without charge. The Attorney-General eventually confirmed there was no case against them. He destroyed their lives because he could.

There is also Abubakar Idris, known as Dadiyata, a lecturer and activist who was abducted from his Kaduna home on August 2, 2019. He has not been seen since. August 2026 will mark seven years of enforced disappearance. No arrest. No explanation. Just the silence that follows when a government decides a man must simply cease to exist.

Dr. Obadiah Mailafia, former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank and a fearless voice against the killing of Christians in southern Kaduna, was repeatedly summoned by the DSS with the complicity of governor Nasir El-Rufai, after he publicly alleged that a sitting northern governor was sponsoring terrorism. He cried openly that his life was in danger. He died in September 2021, in a detention’s hospital under the control of enemies. The circumstances of his death were never properly investigated.

As FCT Minister, El-Rufai also revoked the Abuja land of former Head of State General Yakubu Gowon, the man who held Nigeria together through civil war, a detail later confirmed by Bishop Kukah. A Christian elder statesman who bled for this country was treated like a squatter on his own property.

El-Rufai left Kaduna in May 2023 having decimated over 100 communities in Southern Kaduna, demolished thousands of homes, and stripped tens of thousands of workers of their livelihoods without due process, while journalists and activists fled into internal exile.

So no, the bail conditions are not excessive. They are a gentle introduction to accountability for a man who spent twenty years treating accountability as a burden meant for lesser people. The N100 million surety is the price of one demolished church. The court demanding proof that he will not flee is a small insult compared to every family he made flee their homes at gunpoint and at gunpoint alone.

Amaechi thinks he was joking. He was not. El-Rufai deserves every condition that court placed on him and more. The dead he left behind deserve that much company in this conversation.

Celphas Iyorhen
A Concerned Citizen from the Middle-Belt.

By Mohammed Bello Doka

Somewhere in a detention cell, Nasir El-Rufai must be smiling because the man who put him there—the once all-powerful National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu—has just been dumped, neutered, and reduced to an international errand boy. It is the sweetest revenge, served slowly and silently, by the very system Ribadu helped to build.

Robert Greene, in The 48 Laws of Power, warned that “the danger is long, the blow is sudden.” In Ribadu’s case, the blow came from a man he once called a friend, and it landed with the precision of a master strategist.

The story of El-Rufai and Ribadu is not merely a political feud; it is a Shakespearean tragedy of ambition, betrayal, and the brutal arithmetic of power in Nigeria. The two men were once bosom friends, climbing the greasy pole together, sharing confidences and strategies. But power, as Lord Acton famously observed, corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. When Ribadu began to harbour ambitions for the 2031 presidency, he reportedly saw El-Rufai as a threat to be eliminated. He not only abandoned the man who stood by him but, according to the former governor, set out to destroy him using the entire machinery of the state.

El-Rufai has repeatedly accused Ribadu of directing security operatives to arrest political opponents without proper investigation, interfering in judicial processes, and weaponising the Department of State Services (DSS), the Police, and the EFCC to “tame” him. In a devastating interview on Arise Television in February 2026, he declared that he was “ashamed” of their past friendship, leveling a public indictment that echoed far beyond the television screen.

The most dangerous accusation came when El-Rufai, in a now-infamous interview on Arise Television’s Prime Time programme, claimed that “someone wiretapped” Ribadu’s phone, allowing him to listen to a conversation in which the NSA purportedly gave the order for his arrest. For a man charged with the nation’s most sensitive security apparatus to be caught in such a compromising position was not only unprofessional; it was catastrophic. The state responded with force. The Department of State Services (DSS) filed criminal charges against El-Rufai, accusing him of unlawfully intercepting the NSA’s phone communications. But the damage was done. The perception of a compromised NSA, one who cannot even secure his own communications, stuck like a poisonous dart.

Yet El-Rufai did not stop there. In a letter dated January 30, 2026, he formally wrote to Ribadu demanding an explanation for why the Office of the NSA (ONSA) allegedly imported approximately 10 kilograms of thallium sulphate—an odourless, colourless, and extremely hazardous toxic chemical—from a supplier in Poland. Ribadu, in an attempt to deflect the blow, referred the allegation to the DSS for investigation and challenged El-Rufai to submit evidence. But the accusation of importing “dangerous toxic chemicals” into the country is not the kind of stain that easily washes off. The very suggestion that the NSA has access to such substances has irrevocably tarnished his reputation.

The charade reached its most absurd and tragic moment on March 29, 2026. Ribadu, who had allegedly orchestrated El-Rufai’s persecution, attended the funeral prayer of El-Rufai’s mother, Hajiya Umma El-Rufai, at the National Mosque in Abuja. Thousands of mourners, including President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and other top government officials, watched as the nation’s security chief, dripping with crocodile tears, paid tribute to a woman he claimed to have fond memories of. For the shrewd observer, it was not a moment of peace; it was the chilling silence before the storm. As Niccolò Machiavelli wrote, “Men are so simple and so much inclined to obey immediate needs that a deceiver will never lack victims for his deceptions.” Ribadu may have seen this as reconciliation; El-Rufai likely saw it as a confirmation of his enemy’s hubris.

By the time the French news agency Agence France-Presse (AFP) published its explosive report on February 23, 2026, claiming that Ribadu orchestrated a multimillion-dollar helicopter ransom payment to Boko Haram, the NSA’s reputation was already in ruins. The so-called “French Dagger” was not the killing blow; it was merely the alibi, the final piece of paper that gave Tinubu the excuse he needed to act. The newly created position of the Special Adviser on Homeland Security, awarded to a Yoruba kinsman of the President, was the executioner’s blade. It stripped Ribadu of his domestic security portfolio, leaving him with only the hollow title of NSA and the demeaning task of handling international liaison. As Baltasar Gracián wrote in The Art of Worldly Wisdom, “Never depend on the arms of others.” Ribadu had no political base, no governors, no party. He was a man of power only because Tinubu lent it to him, and when the wind changed, the power was taken back.

Ribadu, who was once the most powerful Northerner in the Villa, has been reduced to the same ghostly status as Vice President Kashim Shettima—visible in photographs but absent in influence. The man who used the security apparatus to fight his northern rivals has now been fought by the very same machine. El-Rufai sits in a detention cell, not because of Ribadu’s power, but because he dared to speak the truth. And yet, in a bitter twist of irony, Ribadu is the one who has been politically executed. The man who tried to destroy his friend has been destroyed by the very system he helped entrench. As Napoleon Bonaparte once noted, “He who fears being conquered is sure of defeat.” Ribadu feared El-Rufais ambition and tried to crush it, but in doing so, he exposed his own fatal weakness. The wiretap, the poison gas, the ransom payments—whether true or false, these allegations have defined his legacy.

The new Homeland Security Adviser, Retired Major General Famadewa, now controls internal security coordination, intelligence fusion on domestic threats, and hostage negotiation protocols. Ribadu has been handed the impossible task of defending his legacy from a position of complete irrelevance. He will travel, attend meetings, and smile for the cameras. But the real power has departed. The chickens have finally come home to roost.

El-Rufai, for all his troubles, has achieved a monumental feat. He has not only destroyed the reputation of his once-friend but has also forced Tinubu to act, exposing the hollow core of the administration’s much-vaunted security architecture. The French dagger was just the delivery boy. The real knockout punch was thrown by a man who knew Ribadu better than anyone else—and who used that knowledge to bring him down.

Congratulations, Nuhu Ribadu. You are now officially dumped. And in that cell, believe it or not, Nasir El-Rufai is laughing.

As the ancient warrior-philosopher Sun Tzu wrote, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” El-Rufai did not need to fire a single shot. He simply told the truth, and the truth—no matter how inconvenient—had the power to destroy an empire. May this serve as a lesson to those who entrench dictatorships: you will always be its first victim.

Mohammed Bello Doka can be reached via bellodoka82@gmail.com