By Dan Osa-Ogbegie, Esq.
Yesterday’s [Monday, January 12] press statement by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) on Ekpoma was not an outburst. It was a sober indictment. The responses it elicited from Monday Okpebholo, his party chairman “Emperor” Jarrett Tenebe, and the APC spokesman Peter Uwadiae-Igbinigie have only confirmed the very fears Edo people harbour: that this government is less interested in protecting lives than in protecting power.
Strip away the performative condolences, the carefully worded platitudes, and the rehearsed outrage, and one fact remains stubbornly clear that the ferocity with which students and protesters were arrested in Ekpoma was not provoked by kidnappings, killings, or insecurity. It was provoked by allegations that a campaign billboard of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was touched. In the warped priorities of the Okpebholo administration, a billboard appears to matter more than blood on Edo soil.
If this government were truly moved by the anguish of Ekpoma, arrests would have followed kidnappers, not students. If it were animated by public safety, remand orders would have been sought against criminals, not undergraduates. This was not about security. It was about politics. More precisely, it was about panic.
Governor Okpebholo’s obsession is no longer a secret. He is fixated on producing a fictitious 3.5 million votes for President Tinubu in Edo State.
This obsession would be laughable if it were not so destructive. Edo State has less than 2.7 million registered voters. Yet in the fevered imagination of this administration, reality must bend to propaganda, arithmetic must submit to ambition, and citizens must be sacrificed on the altar of electoral validation.
This is what explains the brutality. This is what explains the haste. This is what explains why students protesting kidnappings and those who did not even join the protest but were sleeping in their hostel, were treated like insurgents, while kidnappers roam with impunity. The Ekpoma arrests were not a security response. They were a political message. Touch Tinubu’s image and the full weight of the state descends. Kidnap Edo people and the state looks the other way.
The Governor’s statement, drenched in sympathy and self praise, collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. A government that claims to “stand with Ekpoma” does not jail Ekpoma’s children. A government that claims to “hear the voices of the people” does not answer those voices with tear gas, batons, and detention orders. A government that claims to prioritise lives does not weaponise the police against peaceful protest.
More troubling is the descent of the APC into open intimidation. The statement by Jarrett Tenebe, the embattled Chairman of the Edo APC, who has long ran out his tenure as acting Chairman and now acting illegally , is not merely irresponsible, It is dangerous. To accuse an opposition spokesman of orchestrating violence for demanding the release of peaceful protesters and innocent students, is to criminalise dissent itself. It is the language of regimes that have lost legitimacy and now seek survival through fear.
Even more revealing is the APC’s second statement, which finally drops the mask. The Ekpoma protest, we are told, was illegitimate because it allegedly targeted billboards bearing the images of Okpebholo and Tinubu. In that single admission lies the moral bankruptcy of the APC. Not once do they centre the murdered young man. Not once do they mourn the abducted. Not once do they grapple with the terror stalking Ekpoma. Their grievance is political branding.
History offers chilling parallels. Illegitimate governments have always behaved this way. From juntas that jailed students for chanting freedom songs, to authoritarian regimes that protected statues while citizens starved, the pattern is consistent. When power lacks consent, it replaces service with coercion. When legitimacy is absent, propaganda becomes sacred. When conscience dies, billboards become more valuable than lives.
Governor Okpebholo would do well to study this history. Governments that confuse force for authority eventually collapse under the weight of their own cruelty. Arrests do not manufacture legitimacy. Detention does not inspire loyalty. And no amount of inflated vote targets can erase the truth written in the fear of Ekpoma’s residents.
Jarrett Tenebe and his fellow street enforcers must also pause. This frantic quest for validation, this compulsive need to prove relevance through repression, is not strength. It is insecurity. Edo people matter beyond elections. They matter beyond billboards. They matter beyond Abuja applause.
The APC may believe it can bully its way into history. It cannot. History is unforgiving to governments that jail the innocent, excuse the guilty, and mistake silence for peace. Ekpoma has spoken. Edo is watching. And the verdict forming in the conscience of the people is far harsher than any press statement.
The tragedy of this moment is not merely that students were arrested. It is that a government was exposed. Exposed as one driven by electoral arithmetic rather than human life. Exposed as one intoxicated by power but devoid of empathy. Exposed as one prepared to burn Edo’s soul to impress a distant political altar.
That is the real disturbance in Ekpoma. And no amount of press releases can suppress it.
Daniel Aroren Noah Osa-Ogbegie, a Benin-based legal practitioner and Apostle of Edo Renaissance, is Publicity Secretary, Edo PDP.
