By Achilleus-Chud Uchegbu
On a Tuesday in Abakaliki, at the Christian Ecumenical Centre, Ebonyi State Governor Francis Nwifuru stood before 13 newly inaugurated local government chairmen, their deputies, and 171 councillors, and gave an instruction that has since reverberated far beyond the state’s borders. Any chairman who allowed a rival political figure to “mess up” in his council area, the governor declared, should deal with that person mercilessly. He added that it is either you are with him, or you are against him. Any chairman who failed to deliver his local government to the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2027 general election, Nwifuru warned, would be removed and replaced. The message was unambiguous, and it was meant to be read exactly as it was given; simply as an order to crush the opposition, not merely to outcompete it.
Governor Nwifuru’s order should be read not as an isolated outburst from a desperately struggling governor, but as another page in a growing and troubling narrative of blood and body bags by APC leaders. To many Nigerians, the governor’s order represents the normalisation of intolerance within the ruling party as it approaches the 2027 general election. This pattern has taken shape from state houses to local government secretariats, where political dominance is pursued not through the ordinary machinery of persuasion, service delivery, and competitive campaigning, but through intimidation, the threat of violence, and the deliberate foreclosure of political space for rivals. Nwifuru’s Abakaliki directive fits neatly, and alarmingly, into that pattern.
Nigerians are worried because the threat was made by a governor, and as such it does not carry the same weight as that made by the Kuje Area Council Chairman, or an APC official in Borno State or that made by a senator in Osun State. With official instruments of coercion controlled by the state executive, Nwifuru is in a position to unleash the Police and other lethal weapons-bearing agencies of the state against the opposition in Ebonyi, principally, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).
What makes the governor’s remarks so significant is not merely their bluntness but their framing. Democratic competition presumes that a party seeking re-election will make its case to voters on the strength of its performance, and also accept the possibility of losing some contests. But Nwifuru’s language was dispensed with disgust and an arrogant disposition to being an expert in violent conduct. He made it look like he was free to dispense with life in order to protect his being in power. His arrogant disposition is laced with disdain for the constitutional right of the people to belong to whichever political party of their choice and also to vote as they willfully desire without coercion.
Arrogantly, he warned the assembled chairmen, among whom were relatives of powerful figures in the state, including the son of a federal minister and a relation of the governor’s own wife, that their tenure would be judged solely by whether they could deliver total victory, and that failure would cost them their jobs. This was, in other words, ordering the chairmen to adopt whatever means were within their reach to ensure that opposition parties did not have a foothold in their council areas. Obviously, Nwifuru wasn’t talking of protecting the same democracy that brought him to power in the first place.
This is not the language of a governing party expressing confidence in its record and its popularity. It is the language of a political apparatus that treats opposition presence in any local government as an intolerable defect to be corrected by force of will, patronage, and, if the rhetoric is taken at face value, coercion. The instruction to act “mercilessly” against anyone who tries to organise or campaign on behalf of a rival party is not a call to robust politics but an invitation to the local government chairmen to treat opposition activity as something to be physically or forcefully suppressed.
Ebonyi’s PDP has, however, taken note of this threat and stated that Nwifuru’s remarks formed part of a broader pattern of combative rhetoric from the governor, including an earlier vow to overwhelm the opposition entirely. The state PDP further linked the governor’s comments to reports of attacks on opposition members in Ohaukwu and Ezza South local government areas, and to alleged assaults on journalists covering party activity in the state. Whatever the precise details of each incident, the accumulation of such allegations around a single administration’s rhetoric is itself a warning sign. Words from a state’s chief security officer carry a different weight than words from an ordinary politician. When such a figure tells newly empowered local officials to deal mercilessly with dissenting voices, the risk is not abstract. It is a permission structure, however informally granted, for exactly the kind of grassroots political violence that has scarred previous Nigerian election cycles.
This is precisely why Ebonyi’s episode cannot be treated in isolation. Similar threats issued against perceived defectors or opposition sympathisers, and a broader culture in which political loyalty is enforced through fear of exclusion from state largesse or worse, have recurred across states under APC control in the run-up to previous elections. Each incident can be, and often is, explained away as tough political talk or as the ordinary Nigerian campaign rhetoric. But taken together, a pattern of this kind tells a different story. It tells a story of a ruling party increasingly unwilling to accept the basic premise of pluralism, in which opposition parties are expected to exist, organise, and occasionally win. It tells a story of a ruling party that is increasingly desperate and scared of facing the people in an open election and has chosen to campaign with the threat of violence and to intimidate the people rather than campaigning with its achievements. This is the dilemma that Nwifuru faces. It is also a dilemma: winning more converts for PDP and selling the camp of his biggest rival, Ifeanyi Chukwu Odii.
Nwifuru and APC’s threats reflect weakness rather than confidence. A party secure in its popularity does not need to threaten local officials with removal for failing to deliver impossible, uniform victories, nor does it need to instruct new chairmen to treat rival parties as something requiring “merciless” suppression. Analysts examining the Ebonyi directive have suggested that the sweeping and punitive nature of Nwifuru’s demand of no tolerance for any opposition foothold anywhere in the state points to a leadership anxious about its standing rather than assured of it. Genuine dominance expresses itself in electoral results, not in pre-emptive threats issued months or years before a vote is cast.
Read another way, Nwifuru’s order is less a demonstration of strength and more a symptom of anticipated defeat. If the APC’s position in Ebonyi and elsewhere were as secure as its leaders publicly claim, there would be no need to instruct council chairmen to prevent opposition parties from gaining any foothold whatsoever, nor to threaten removal from office as the price of anything short of total victory. Desperation dressed as discipline is still desperation. The more sweeping and absolute the demand for control, the more it suggests that those making the demand fear they cannot win the argument through ordinary democratic means.
Nigeria’s electoral history includes painful episodes of local political violence in which the incendiary rhetoric of powerful figures translated, at the grassroots level, into real intimidation, real assaults, and in the worst cases, real bloodshed. When a sitting governor tells newly empowered local officials to act “mercilessly” toward opposition figures, and links their continued employment directly to their success in denying the opposition any space at all, the risk of that rhetoric being read, correctly or not, as license to shed blood rises sharply. Ebonyi’s PDP has already warned that it will not stand by passively should any harm come to its members as a result of these threats, and has demanded a retraction.
Whether Governor Nwifuru’s words are ultimately understood as political theatre or genuine incitement, they have already damaged the APC. As Nigeria moves toward the 2027 general election, that signal, much like the one from Kuja in the FCT and Borno State, should concern anyone who values a competitive, peaceful democratic process over one increasingly shaped by fear.