OPINION: Kwara in Blood: Who should we hold to Account?- By: Adio Friday Odunjo

I am just asking a simple question: how did we let this happen to Kwara? Which sin did we commit as a people that our children should now sleep with one eye open? We used to speak of “Harmony.” We sang of Kwara’s calm. Where is that Harmony now?

Leadership is the problem. Try telling a bereaved wife in Oke Ode wailing in that horrible video that leadership is merely theory. Tell her that while she counts bodies and recites names, the argument about policy will soothe her wound. She will look at you as if you were mad.

They tell us not to politicise pain. “Don’t make politics of insecurity,” they say. Who else then should we hold to account if not a government that swore to protect life and property? When bandits pick our villages like ripe fruit and slaughter our people in broad daylight, what is the alternative to holding the governor to account? Who will we call on if not the man whose oath is to secure the state? We will hold Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq by his neck, yes, but with every right and the full force of civic indignation.

Look at Oke Ode. The blood is fresh. The deaths are too many. Families are in ruin. This is not the result of a transient failure; this is a collapse of purpose. Bandits do not strike because they are bored. They strike because the message from the top is: you can. The absence of decisive, visible, and sustained security response is a policy inaction with human cost.

And then there is the theatre. While the hinterlands burn, while people abandon farms and flee ancestral homes, the governor is filmed smiling for cameras in another state, cutting ribbons where absence would have meant nothing. What does it do to trust when your chief security officer is attending foreign-looking ceremonies while his citizens count corpses?

Let us speak plainly: the media handlers of the APC deserve a psychiatric evaluation for the way they defend this ineptitude. The SSA on New Media and CPS peddles pity and excuses as if they were strategy. You canvassed for votes; you sought affection and sympathy. Now, when the people need action, you ask for emotional pardon on media timelines. Who should we hold responsible?

Ask yourself: when bandits were being pushed back in neighbouring states, what was the Governor doing? Waiting for the perfect time? Or was he planning real security measures? Why must it take a catastrophe for the state to request help? Why was there no coordinated, pre-emptive engagement with security forces? Why were local vigilantes left without support?

And for those who say this is “politicising” death: let me tell you the truth. To call for accountability is not politicising grief it is demanding governance. To ask where the soldiers are, is not to play party politics. It is to insist on the covenant between rulers and the ruled. If the covenant is broken, the people may resort to every civic means to retrieve it.

We also see the corrosive consequence: people arming themselves, vigilantes improvising patrols, whole communities abandoning their farms and shops. This is the ruin that follows governance that treats protection as an afterthought.

If there is culpability and there is those responsible must answer. Not with platitudes, not with emotional begging for understanding.
Finally, a plea to Kwarans: do not be pacified by staging. Remember how APC abandoned you into the hands of terrorists.

Adio Odunjo Obbo-Ile
*Kwara State PDP Youth leader*

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