Editorial: Gov. Okpebholo’s Outrageous Appointment of 4,800 Special Assistants

Edo State has always prided itself on being one of Nigeria’s more politically mature jurisdictions; a state where governance occasionally rises above the level of roadside theatre. Governor Lucky Okpebholo’s appointment of 4,800 special assistants, however, suggests that Edo has now joined the national race to the bottom. It is an act so extravagant, so intellectually insulting, so fiscally reckless, that it deserves to be recorded as a case study in how Nigerian democracy is being hollowed out by the very people elected to defend it. The governor’s justification that “we all worked for this victory” and that governance must “trickle down” to party loyalists, is not merely tone deaf. It is a confession. Okpebholo has admitted, with the candor of a man unaware he is speaking into a live microphone, that public office in Edo is now a spoils system, a partisan buffet in which the state treasury is carved up to reward foot soldiers. This is not governance. It is patronage masquerading as policy, a job for the boys jamboree dressed up as grassroots inclusion.

To be fair, the governor has not violated the constitution. But legality is a low bar; even the most ruinous decisions can be technically lawful. The real question; the one Okpebholo refuses to answer, is whether Edo State can afford this circus. The state depends almost entirely on federal allocations to survive. Its pensioners remain unpaid. Its infrastructure is decaying. Its hospitals resemble waiting rooms for despair. Yet the governor has decided that what Edo needs most urgently is 4800 political ornaments each presumably drawing salaries, allowances, and the inevitable perquisites of proximity to power. One wonders where these assistants will sit. Edo’s government offices are not known for their spaciousness. Will they be stacked in corridors like bureaucratic furniture? Will they share desks, chairs, or perhaps rotate shifts like factory workers? Or will they simply exist on paper as ghost workers with official titles but no official duties, except to swell the payroll and drain the treasury?

The governor’s defenders insist that this is “grassroots governance.” But governance is not a headcount. It is not measured by the number of aides orbiting a governor like satellites around a dying star. It is measured by competence, efficiency, and the ability to deliver public goods. Edo functioned badly, but functioned with 186 aides under Okpebholo’s predecessor. What catastrophe has occurred since then to justify a workforce 25 times larger? Has the state’s complexity multiplied? Has its population exploded? Has governance become so intellectually demanding that only an army of assistants can keep the machinery running?

The answer, of course, is political. Okpebholo is paying debts, not financial ones, but electoral ones. He is distributing patronage to secure loyalty, to cement his authority within the APC, and to ensure that his victory is not merely celebrated but monetized. This is politics at its most primitive: the conversion of public office into private reward. The tragedy is not merely the waste. It is the message. When a governor treats the state treasury as a partisan ATM, he signals that public service is a racket, not a responsibility. He tells citizens that competence is irrelevant, that loyalty is currency, and that governance is a performance staged for party faithful rather than a duty owed to the public. In such a climate, corruption is not an aberration; it is an inevitability.

The Edo State House of Assembly, meanwhile, has adopted its usual posture: silence. Legislatures in Nigeria have perfected the art of institutional hibernation, awakening only when budgets must be passed or when political winds shift. But this is precisely the moment when oversight is required. A governor who appoints 4,800 assistants is not merely stretching the limits of executive discretion; he is testing the boundaries of legislative cowardice. Nigeria needs a national conversation about the grotesque inflation of political appointments. Across the federation, governors now behave like medieval monarchs, surrounding themselves with entourages so large they resemble courts rather than cabinets. The size of a governor’s retinue has become a proxy for his political insecurity; the more assistants he hires, the more fragile his authority appears. Okpebholo’s decision is not an isolated misjudgment. It is part of a broader trend in which Nigerian democracy is being suffocated by patronage, prebendalism, and the relentless politicization of public administration. The state is no longer a vehicle for development; it is a warehouse for political compensation.

Edo deserves better. Its people deserve a governor who understands that leadership is not measured by the number of assistants one appoints but by the number of problems one solves. They deserve a government that invests in schools, hospitals, roads, and pensions, not in armies of aides whose primary function is to applaud at political rallies. Okpebholo may believe he is strengthening his political base. In reality, he is weakening the very institution he was elected to lead. Governance is not a party affair. It is a public trust. And when that trust is squandered on 4,800 political appointees, the cost is borne not by the APC but by the ordinary citizens of Edo State; taxpayers who must now subsidize a patronage machine disguised as governance. If this is the future of Nigerian democracy, then the republic is in deeper trouble than anyone cares to admit.