Ẹmilókan: Joe Igbokwe and the Spoils of War
Aliyu Bala Aliyu
Ẹmilókan: Joe Igbokwe and the Spoils of War
By Aliyu Bala Aliyu
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu did not build a political empire on ideology — not in the sense that Chief Obafemi Awolowo did. Awolowo's Action Group was, whatever its flaws, a project of ideas: free education, welfarism, a coherent theory of what government owed the governed. Tinubu's empire runs on a different fuel entirely. It is a transactional relationship — a ledger of loyalty given and rewarded, kept with the precision of a man who understands that power, like Lagos itself, runs on liquidity. To his credit, he built men and women out of the raw material of ambition: an army of fierce loyalists who moved when he moved, spoke when he needed a voice, and absorbed the blows meant for him and still do. This is not a small thing in Nigerian politics, where loyalty is cheap and betrayal is the default currency. Tinubu inverted that. He made loyalty pay — usually.
The Punch columnist, Abimbola Adunni Adelakun, writing in her Punch column of January 2022 as Tinubu's presidential ambition became an undeniable reality, argued that his rise was less a triumph of governance than a triumph of accumulated transactional capital — years of quietly investing in people and institutions, building an obligation network that would eventually cash out at Aso Rock. She may not have been “charitable” to him. But she was not wrong about the mechanics of his empire. Even if one disputes her verdict on the man. Tinubu's Lagos was never really about Lagos. It was capital formation; and the facts today speak for themselves. Look at Lagos under his eight years, and under the succession he engineered and has since guarded like a family heirloom. Non-indigenes have not merely been tolerated in the state's political architecture — they have been elevated into it.
The machinery did, for years, distribute its returns broadly. South-easterners have sat as heads of agencies and commissioners; occupied seats in both the state and federal Houses of Assembly, and run the party's secretariat as state secretary. South-southerners have served as commissioners, North-westerners, have served as deputy chair of Agege local government; North-central loyalists have gained access to the inner sanctum of Tinubu’s political empire. Lagos has indeed welcomed all and each had a slice of the Lagos pie — the pie of excellence. Whatever else one says of Tinubu, Lagos under his shadow has been a state that shares. And it all carries his unmistakable imprimatur — whether this was strategic architecture built with an eye permanently fixed on Abuja, or simply the instinct of a man who believes in empowering the people around him. Perhaps both. Ambition and generosity are not mutually exclusive; and in Tinubu's case, they are often the same motion.
Ben Akabueze is the model case of the machine working as designed. Tinubu made him Commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget in 2007. Fashola, his handpicked successor, kept him in the role through 2015. Then Tinubu's reach extended beyond Lagos: Akabueze became Special Adviser on National Planning to Buhari in 2016, then Director-General of the Federal Budget Office, a post he held until 2024 — seventeen years across three administrations, launched and sustained by one man's endorsement. That is loyalty properly rewarded. It is also, increasingly, an indictment of what has happened since — because the machine that produced Akabueze has, in recent years, developed some curious blind spots.
Consider who else has been fed at Tinubu's table. Femi Fani-Kayode and Reno Omokri, two men who spent years describing Tinubu in terms that frequently crossed from criticism into open contempt, are now Nigeria's ambassadors — to Germany and Mexico respectively, confirmed by the Senate in December 2025. Nyesom Wike, a PDP chieftain who worked against his own party's presidential candidate in 2023, was made Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. Ayodele Fayose, a PDP stalwart, was recently made Chairman of the Rural Electrification Agency. Mohammed Babangida, son of a former military president following a crème de la crème book launch of his father landed the Chairman, Bank of Agriculture role. Bianca Ojukwu, who campaigned for Peter Obi's Labour Party against Tinubu in 2023, was made Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in late 2024 and elevated to substantive Minister in April 2026.
Now set Joe Igbokwe beside that above list. Few APC loyalists have paid a steeper price for the party. Joe Igbokwe was a fixture of the Action Congress-turned-ACN before the merger that produced the APC. He was the most visible non-Yoruba defender of a Yoruba political machine long before it was safe or fashionable to be one. He absorbed the trolling and the bullying that came with the role. In October 2021, his country home in Nnewi was burned down in an attack he attributed to IPOB operatives retaliating against his relentless public opposition to the secessionist movement. Whatever the precise motive of the arsonists, the fire was a direct consequence of the political ground he chose to occupy, loudly and without retreat, on Tinubu's and the party's behalf.
Three years into Tinubu's presidency, Joe Igbokwe remains where he essentially started: a state-level Special Adviser to Governor Sanwo-Olu on Drainage and Water Resources. This is worth sitting with, because it is not simple neglect, it is a specific and repeated demotion. When Sanwo-Olu forwarded his slate of nominees to the Lagos Assembly in 2019, Igbokwe's name was confirmed alongside the commissioners. He was not blocked. He was simply re-routed, to the Special Adviser tier rather than a substantive commissionership — a lesser portfolio for a man whose public sacrifice for the party exceeded that of several who outranked him in Sanwo-Olu's cabinet. No cabinet seat in Abuja. No appointment as Executive Secretary or Director-General of any of the thousands of federal agencies at the president's disposal. Not even one of the several federal institutions headquartered in Lagos!
There is a wider habit worth naming alongside this. Tinubu has shown real fluency for appeasing history's ghosts — the University of Abuja became Yakubu Gowon University in December 2024, the University of Maiduguri now bears Buhari's name, the Institute of Petroleum Studies in Kaduna now carries the fifth longest University name in Africa — “General Shehu Musa Yar'Adua University of Geological Sciences and Engineering Technology”. Quite a mouthful. But it is a curious asymmetry that Abdulsalami Abubakar, Umaru Musa Yar'Adua, Goodluck Jonathan; and even Gen Sani Abacha — men whose eras shaped the republic as much as any of those who have found favour in Tinubu’s largesse whether in life or in death have yet to receive the same gesture.
The children of MKO Abiola and nephew of Shehu Shagari have not been left out of the bazaar. Each received federal appointments carrying their fathers' names into the present. I do not know if Vice President’s families are worthy of the Ẹmilókan largesse; and if they are, it would be nice to see the son or daughter of Alex Ekueme among the recipients. It is quite a curious asymmetry: ancestors and hitherto political rivals get remembered generously, while a living loyalist who bled for the cause is passed over repeatedly.
There is an Igbo proverb Joe Igbokwe would recognize better than most: egbé bere, úgo bere; nke sị ibe ya ebéla, nku kwàa ya (et the kite perch, let the eagle perch too; whoever says the other must not perch, may its wing break). It is a proverb about the minimum decency of shared space, not special treatment. Joe Igbokwe, I believe, is not asking to be the eagle. The Yoruba version from the other side of the ledger says: Ọwọ́ ọmọdé kò tó pẹpẹ, ti àgbàlagbà kò wọ akèrègbè (the child's hand cannot reach the high shelf, and the elder's hand cannot fit into a narrow gourd). Power and loyalty need each other in both directions. Tinubu could not have built what he built without hands like Igbokwe's reaching up on his behalf. It seems only fair that his hand, now on the high shelf, reach back down.
I hold no APC card. I do not know Joe Igbokwe from Adam. I write as an observer of the terrain, not a combatant in it. But fairness is not a partisan value, and this particular unfairness is glaring enough that it needs no party affiliation to see it. The man built more of Tinubu's Southeast argument than almost anyone still standing. And when a war is finally won, the most revealing thing about a victor is not how he treats his enemies, it is how he remembers his soldiers. The least the spoils of that war can do is remember him. It is not too late to do right by Joe Igbokwe.
Aliyu Bala Aliyu
10.08.2026