THE GODFATHER’S CURSE: A History of Political Betrayal in Nigeria, and the New Season of Broken Vows

_By Sam Agogo_

Every political culture has its founding myths, and Nigeria’s is the myth of loyalty rewarded. From the earliest days of the First Republic, the country’s politics has run on an unwritten code: a senior figure identifies a promising younger man, opens doors for him, spends money and reputation on his behalf, and expects in return a debt understood to be owed for life.

It is a code borrowed from older social structures — a chief and his lieutenants, an elder and his protégés — transplanted into the compressed, high-stakes arena of modern electoral politics. When it works, it produces continuity: administrations that build on each other, structures that outlast a single man’s tenure. When it fails, it produces the opposite — assemblies turned into battlegrounds, governments paralysed for months, and public resources burned in the settling of scores between men who once called each other father and son. It is this second story that grips the Nigerian imagination most, and it is worth tracing the habit to its roots before turning to its most dramatic recent chapters, in Benue, in Rivers, in Bayelsa, and in the still-contested case of Akinwunmi Ambode.
Godfatherism did not begin as the predatory affair it has become. In the First Republic, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello practised a gentler form of political mentorship, scouting and financing younger politicians with the aim of grooming successors who would serve the public rather than enrich the mentor. That arrangement did not survive military rule. When civilian politics returned in 1979, the rising cost of elections pushed parties toward dependence on wealthy financiers, and power drifted from party structures into individual hands. By the time the Fourth Republic began in 1999, godfatherism had hardened into a business venture, with financiers demanding a direct return — contracts, appointments, a share of public funds — and reaching for state resources and outright violence whenever a godson stepped out of line.
Anambra provided one of the earliest and most violent illustrations of this. Chief Chris Uba financed and installed Chris Ngige as governor in 2003, expecting total control of the state treasury. Ngige resisted, and within months Uba struck back dramatically: in July 2003, policemen loyal to him stormed Government House in Awka, seized Ngige, and drove him out of the state to force his resignation. Ngige refused to sign, and public fury forced his return within hours. He later lost his seat when the courts declared Peter Obi the validly elected governor in 2006, but the man once dragged from his own office went on to serve as a federal minister under two administrations — a longer and steadier career than his godfather’s.
Kano’s godfather war has proved among the most enduring. Rabiu Kwankwaso made his deputy, Abdullahi Ganduje, governor in 2015, expecting him to carry forward the Kwankwasiyya movement he had built over more than a decade. Ganduje shrugged off his benefactor almost immediately, declaring he would govern “without the influence of any godfather.” The rupture turned bitter and personal, playing out for years through public accusations and a bribery scandal that further poisoned relations between the two men. Ganduje completed two terms and rose to become APC national chairman, while Kwankwaso rebuilt from the wilderness. When Kwankwaso returned by installing a second protégé, Abba Kabir Yusuf, as governor in 2023, the pattern struck again: Yusuf broke from him and walked straight into the APC that Ganduje now leads. Kwankwaso calls January 23 a “Day of Betrayal.” Kano’s political class is still arguing over whether that verdict is fair, or whether he was simply harvesting what he once sowed against his own benefactor.
It would be too simple, and too unfair, to call this pattern mere ingratitude. Nigerian godfatherism was never wholesome, even where it worked. It was, mostly, a transaction: a benefactor sought a proxy through whom he could keep controlling resources long after leaving office, and a protégé accepted the platform because without it his ambition would have gone nowhere. When the protégé later insists on governing in his own right, it is not always betrayal in the moral sense — sometimes it is a man refusing to remain a puppet. But just as often it is naked disloyalty. The difficulty is telling the two apart. That difficulty is the real subject of this piece.
No chapter is more instructive than Ibadan’s. Chief Lamidi Adedibu, the self-styled “Garrison Commander” of Oyo politics, installed Rashidi Ladoja as governor in 2003, expecting in return a share of local government funds and a say in every appointment — what he called his “security votes.” Ladoja refused, and by January 2006, Adedibu’s loyalists in the assembly impeached him in a proceeding that lasted less than half an hour. It took the Supreme Court eleven months to nullify that impeachment, by which time the damage to Ladoja’s standing was done. Yet the story did not end there: in September 2025, nearly two decades later, he was crowned the 44th Olubadan of Ibadanland, a vindication Adedibu — who died in 2008 — never lived to see.
Kwara tells a version of the same story spanning two generations. Dr Olusola Saraki built the most durable political dynasty north-central Nigeria has produced, installing governors from 1979 onward and eventually anointing his own son, Bukola, in 2003. Bukola served two terms, then did to his father exactly what would later be done to him: seized the party structure and effectively ended his father’s thirty-year reign. By 2019, the “O to ge” movement — “enough is enough” — swept his entire structure out of Kwara in one election, handing the governorship to his family’s rival, Abdulrahman Abdulrazaq, whose government later demolished Ile-Arugbo, the elder Saraki’s storied home for the aged. The man who dethroned his own father was, in turn, dethroned by the very people he once claimed to speak for.
Benue offers a version of this story unfolding right now. Senator George Akume, now Secretary to the Government of the Federation, carried Reverend Father Hyacinth Alia from the pulpit to Government House in Makurdi in 2023. Three years on, Alia has moved to strip Akume’s structure of its remaining influence, resisting reconciliation efforts and pushing back against Akume loyalists ahead of the 2027 primaries; Akume’s camp, still holding key National Assembly seats, has fought back hard in the recent primaries. But this godfather quarrel is a distraction the people of Benue can ill afford, because the state’s more urgent betrayal is unfolding on its farmlands, in both its major zones. In Benue North, the Sankera axis of Ukum, Logo and Katsina-Ala endured a coordinated onslaught in April 2025 that left more than eighty dead; the grief was so raw that villagers in Ukum, filmed on camera, openly rejected Governor Alia during a condolence visit, chanting in Tiv for their kinsmen to disown him. In Benue South, the Idoma communities of Otukpo, Ugboju and Apa have endured their own wave of attacks — Akpachi and Otukpo-Nobi overrun in a single weekend this July, Edikwu-Ankpali burying nine of its own in April — with grieving youths repeatedly marching corpses to the palace of the Och’Idoma to demand protection the state has not provided. Political betrayal, in Benue’s case, is the smaller story. The graver one is the state’s failure to keep its people, Tiv and Idoma alike, alive.
Rivers State has, in the last three years, become the most instructive theatre of this drama anywhere in the country. Nyesom Wike anointed Siminalayi Fubara as his successor in 2023, expecting the same loyalty he demanded of everyone around him. Fubara’s insistence on running his own government split the Rivers State House of Assembly into rival camps and halted budget presentations for months. The crisis drew in President Bola Tinubu, who declared a state of emergency in March 2025 and suspended both the governor and the legislature for six months. Reconciliation was brokered, broken, and brokered again. Fubara eventually defected to the APC to escape Wike’s reach, only for his re-election ambition to falter: by May 2026 he had stepped down from the APC governorship primary as Wike’s preferred candidates consolidated control, with Wike declaring he would not repeat the mistake of backing “a disloyal person” a second time. Rivers, it now seems, is the rare case in which the godfather, not the godson, wins the war.
Then there is the story of Akinwunmi Ambode, which this piece treats with particular care, because it is less a tale of betrayal than of a man who fell out of favour with the powers that be. Ambode was not accused of turning against a benefactor; the powers that be in Lagos, led by Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, simply chose not to allow him to continue into a second term in 2019, clearing the field for Babajide Sanwo-Olu. Tinubu’s camp maintains that Ambode lost a properly conducted primary and that “the governorship mandate is not for Asiwaju to give or take.” That account deserves its place on the record, and Tinubu — a man who has given genuine platforms to a great many Nigerians who rose to become governors, ministers and, ultimately, President — deserves the basic respect due to anyone whose long service to Lagos is a matter of record. What is beyond dispute is that Ambode has since made his peace with that chapter, throwing his weight behind Tinubu’s re-election and endorsing the Tinubu-backed Femi Hamzat for Lagos governor in 2027.
Edo tells perhaps the most complete story of all, because it has already reached its final act. Adams Oshiomhole made Godwin Obaseki governor in 2016 over the objections of party elders. Obaseki spent his first term consolidating around his benefactor before turning into Oshiomhole’s fiercest adversary — decamping to the PDP when the APC blocked his re-election, and falling out with his own deputy, Philip Shaibu, along the way. Oshiomhole lost his seat as APC national chairman in the fallout but rebuilt methodically until, in September 2024, the APC recaptured Edo behind Monday Okpebholo, with Oshiomhole leading the campaign that finally ended Obaseki’s run. By then, Obaseki had been abandoned by nearly everyone who once stood with him — a serial betrayer left, at last, betrayed by everyone in turn.
Bayelsa carries its own version of this story, and its most recent turn is a poignant one. Senator Seriake Dickson, who governed the state from 2012 to 2020, handed power to Douye Diri and made Lawrence Ewhrudjakpo his deputy — and for years the two men held up their relationship as proof that Bayelsa had escaped the godfather curse altogether, with Diri praising Dickson for never acting like a benefactor and the two men exchanging cordial Christmas visits well into 2023. That changed in October 2025, when Diri abruptly resigned from the PDP for the APC, a move Dickson denounced as unnecessary and destabilising, insisting he had made “no demands” and offered “only advice when consulted.” Ewhrudjakpo broke with his own principal over the defection, refusing to follow Diri into the APC and standing by the party that had made him — a stand that put him on a collision course with lawmakers moving to impeach him. He did not live to see how that quarrel would end: on 11 December 2025, still a serving deputy governor at odds with his own governor, he collapsed in his office and died of cardiac arrest at 60. Dickson and Diri remain estranged today, godfather and godson turned rivals heading into 2027, in a state that once held itself up as the exception to Nigeria’s rule.
What, then, does the roll call of Nigeria’s godfather wars tell us about who betrayed whom, and what became of them? In Anambra, Ngige outlasted his own godfather, going on to serve as a federal minister under two administrations. In Kano, Ganduje rose to APC national chairman while Kwankwaso watched his second protégé defect into his old rival’s camp — proof that betrayal there is not a single event but an inheritance passed down. In Oyo, Adedibu won the immediate battle but Ladoja found vindication two decades later on the Olubadan throne. In Kwara, Saraki dethroned his father in 2011 and was himself dethroned by “O to ge” in 2019. In Edo, Obaseki broke from Oshiomhole in 2019 and was routed in 2024 when his coalition of convenience collapsed. In Rivers, Fubara’s break from Wike has so far tilted back toward the godfather. In Bayelsa, Diri’s break from Dickson has left the state’s ruling class divided and its once-celebrated deputy governor dead before the quarrel could be resolved. In Benue, the Alia-Akume contest runs hot into 2027.
The lesson is not that political betrayal is always wrong, nor that loyalty to a benefactor is always right. Nigerian democracy would be poorer if every governor remained forever answerable to the man who handed him the ticket rather than to the people who voted for him. But the record also shows that raw ambition dressed up as principle, and personal vendetta dressed up as independence, have done as much damage to governance as godfatherism itself. Anambra’s abduction of a sitting governor, Oyo’s bloody street clashes, Kwara’s demolished monuments, Benue’s unattended killing fields, Rivers’ paralysis, Bayelsa’s fractured ruling class, and Edo’s stalled development are not abstractions — they are the price ordinary citizens paid while their leaders settled scores. The people of these states deserve governors whose first loyalty was always meant to be to them, and godfathers wise enough to know that the platforms they build are meant to serve the public, not merely to be inherited, guarded and, eventually, betrayed.

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