Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Every era of misrule eventually produces its own epitaph, spoken not by its enemies but by its defenders. On Tuesday, 9 June 2026, at Urhokpota Hall in Benin City, Governor Monday Okpebholo of Edo State supplied it.
“They can even kidnap all of us. Yes, there is no vacancy in Aso Rock.”
Read that sentence again. Sit with it. A serving Governor of a Nigerian state, sworn on the Constitution to protect life and property, stood before his people in a season of mass abductions and announced that the abduction of every Nigerian, himself included, would be an acceptable price for keeping one man in the Villa.
He did not say they cannot kidnap us. He did not say we will hunt them to the ends of the earth. He said they CAN kidnap all of us, and it will not matter, because the throne is safe. The people are negotiable. The seat is not.
THE SOCIAL CONTRACT, STOOD ON ITS HEAD
The entire architecture of the modern state rests on one exchange. Citizens surrender a portion of their liberty to the state, and the state in return guarantees their safety. That is the contract. That is the only reason government exists. Section 14(2)(b) of our Constitution puts it beyond argument: the security and welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.
Okpebholo has now declared the opposite doctrine. In his Nigeria, the primary purpose of the people is the security of the government. The citizen exists to absorb the bullet so that the incumbent may absorb the applause. Eight-year-old schoolchildren may be carried into the forest, but the important thing, the sacred thing, the non-negotiable thing, is that no vacancy shall open in Aso Rock.
This is not a gaffe. A gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth. This is worse. This is a politician deliberately telling the truth.
THE ANTITHESIS, STATED PLAINLY
What should a Governor have said? The antithesis of Okpebholo’s sentence is the founding sentence of any decent republic, and it runs like this.
They cannot kidnap even one of us, because between the kidnapper and the smallest Nigerian child stands the entire weight of the Nigerian state. And if we cannot guarantee that, then there is indeed a vacancy in Aso Rock, for the seat is occupied by a body but vacated by purpose.
That is the difference between a servant of the people and a courtier of the throne. The servant counts the people first and the office second. The courtier counts the office first and would spend the people like loose change to defend it. Okpebholo chose his side in a single breath, before party loyalists, on a campaign podium, with the cameras running.
THE TIMING THAT CONVICTS HIM
Providence has a sense of irony. Within a day of the Governor’s boast, his own government shut down schools across Edo State after a leaked security memo warned of a planned abduction of schoolchildren. Think of the sequence. Tuesday, the Governor announces that mass kidnapping changes nothing. Wednesday, his own state closes its classrooms because the children he governs are no longer safe inside them.
Where in this is the swagger of “no vacancy”? A government that cannot keep a primary school open has no business lecturing anyone about the permanence of its tenancy. The vacancy Okpebholo denies in Abuja is gaping wide open in every padlocked school gate in Edo. It is a vacancy of protection. A vacancy of competence. A vacancy of shame.
THE LIBEL AGAINST THE OPPOSITION
Not content with inverting the social contract, the Governor proceeded to defame half the country. The kidnappings, he announced without a shred of evidence, are the handiwork of the opposition, orchestrated to tarnish President Tinubu.
Let us be precise about what this claim requires us to believe. It requires us to believe that opposition politicians are financing bandits in Zamfara, herding schoolchildren into forests in Kebbi and Oyo, and ambushing travellers on Edo highways, all as a media strategy. It is an allegation of treason and terrorism levelled at unnamed Nigerians by a man who controls a state security apparatus and could, if he possessed evidence, arrest somebody.
He has arrested nobody for this grand conspiracy. He has named nobody. He has produced nothing. Because there is nothing. Insecurity did not begin when the opposition coalesced; it metastasised under an administration that budgets trillions for defence and delivers condolence statements. When the roof leaks, the Yoruba say, you do not accuse the rain of politics. You fix the roof.
THE ARITHMETIC HE SHOULD FEAR
The Governor pledged 2.5 million Edo votes for the President in 2027. One wonders from which register he intends to conjure them, and whether the parents standing outside shuttered school gates this week are part of his projection. Nigerians who voted in 2023 delivered roughly 14.6 million votes against this government’s 8.8 million. The opposition has not failed, as the Governor taunted. The opposition was divided. It is divided no longer.
And here is the part the courtiers never grasp until it is too late. There has never been a permanent tenancy in Aso Rock. Shagari believed there was no vacancy. Jonathan’s men sang it as a chorus in 2014, “there is no vacancy in Aso Rock,” word for word, and by May 2015 the removal vans were loading. The throne Okpebholo worships has changed occupants by ballot, by coup and by death. The only thing in Nigeria with genuinely secure tenure is the suffering of the people, and even that is now scheduled for eviction on 16 January 2027.
THE VERDICT
Monday Okpebholo set out to flatter a President and instead indicted an era. His sentence will outlive his tenure, because it compresses into eleven words everything Nigerians have come to understand about this government: that it would rather lose the people than lose power, that it hears the cries of stolen children as background noise to a campaign jingle, that it measures national wellbeing by the comfort of one address in Abuja.
So let the record reflect the correction. There is no vacancy in the forests where our children are held. There is no vacancy in the graves of those who did not come back. There is no vacancy in the fear that now walks every Nigerian road. And precisely because all those vacancies are filled to overflowing, Nigerians will create one more vacancy, lawfully, peacefully and arithmetically, at the only address that matters.
The tenant has been served notice. 16 January 2027 is the quit date.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B, Director General, The Narrative Force, thenarrativeforce.org.
10 June 2026
