03/04/2026
THE POLITICS OF POVERTY OF THE MINDS IN BENUE SOUTH (PART 1)
By Ogenyi, C. A.
The harmattan came early to Otukpo last year. It swept through the town in dry, dusty waves, coating the zinc rooftops, settling on the orange trees lining the road to Ugboju, filling the nostrils of traders, farmers, and motorcycle riders who navigate the crater-riddled streets each morning with the weary expertise of people who have long since stopped expecting the roads to be fixed.
At the Otukpo Central Market, a woman named Mama Ene, fifty-three, a farmer from a village twelve kilometres away, sits behind a pyramid of oranges she has carried since dawn. She woke at four in the morning. She loaded a wheelbarrow. She joined other women on a journey along a path that is barely a road.
A colleague pulls up a wooden stool and sits across from her.
"How long have you been selling here, Mama Ene?"
She adjusts the wrapper tied around her waist, faded now, the colours of a political party barely visible in the cotton.
"Since my husband died. Twelve years. Maybe thirteen."
"And the road, the one from your village, how long has it been like that?"
She looks up slowly, with the expression of someone being asked to count the number of times the sun has risen.
"Since before my husband died," she says. "They have been promising to fix it since before my husband died."
"Who promises?"
"All of them. The councillor. The chairman. The assembly man. The rep. The senator. All of them. Every election, they come. Every election, they promise."
She arranges three oranges on top of her pyramid with unnecessary precision, the gesture of a woman organising her thoughts through her hands.
"Last time, they brought rice. We ate it. The road is still there."
THE PYRAMID AND THE PIT
Benue South Senatorial Zone, the Idoma heartland, stretching across nine local government areas namely; Otukpo, Oju, Obi, Okpoga, Ado, Agatu, Ogbadibo, Ohimini and Apa, is, by any objective agricultural measure, one of the most naturally endowed regions in West Africa.
The soil is dark and generous. The rivers, the great Benue curling along its northern edge, offer irrigation possibilities that agricultural economists have described as "almost criminally underutilised." Yam, cassava, sorghum, soybeans, sesame, groundnuts, citrus; the land produces them all with a fertility that borders on the miraculous.
Nigeria calls Benue State the Food Basket of the Nation.
Yet, the people who grow this food cannot reliably feed their families from the proceeds.
At a roadside tea stall near the Otukpo motor park, Okpani Igoche, sixty-one, a retired civil servant, veteran observer of ten election cycles, wraps both hands around a tin cup and shakes his head slowly when the subject is raised.
"Okpani Igoche, you have watched this zone for decades. What has changed?"
"The vehicles," he says, without hesitation. "The politicians now have bigger vehicles. That is the main change."
He sips his tea.
"The roads are the same. The hospitals are the same. The schools are the same. But the convoys, the convoys have grown. More vehicles now. Bigger. Darker glass. That is the progress of Benue South."
"That sounds like bitterness."
He sets down his cup.
"It is not bitterness. Bitterness is when you are surprised. I am not surprised. I stopped being surprised a long time ago. What I feel now is..." he searches for the word... "arithmetic. I am doing arithmetic. What was promised. What was delivered. The difference between those two numbers, that is not bitterness. That is mathematics."
