Sir: There is a point at which politics ceases to be competition among political parties and mutates into coercion. What is at play currently in Oyede, a peaceful community in Isoko North Local Government Area of Delta State, has long crossed the line of political activism.
The name most frequently associated with that crossing is that of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Delta State Chapter. To critics, the party’s leadership represents a political figure whose relevance is sustained less by popular mandate than by pressure.
At the centre of the controversy is a deeply troubling pattern: the alleged conversion of judicial processes and the Nigerian Police Force into instruments of political intimidation. Courts exist to adjudicate disputes impartially. The police are constitutionally mandated to protect lives and property.
When these begin to function as a tool for silencing dissent, democracy does not merely weaken, it corrodes from within. In the political orbit, many Oyede residents have observed that several arrests, remand orders, and police invitations have become instruments of political discipline rather than mechanisms of justice.
The pattern is not subtle. It is persistent, expansive, and increasingly normalised. Scores of Oyede citizens, community leaders, critics, youth voices, and elders, have reportedly faced arrest, detention, or prolonged legal entanglement following their opposition to the APC’s political agenda.
Whether every case ultimately survives judicial scrutiny is not the central issue. The pattern itself is. When dissent is followed with disturbing regularity by police action, the message is unmistakable: challenge power and pay the price. This in every sense is not leadership. It is intimidation.
More alarming still is the manner in which law enforcement officers has allegedly been deployed. Oyede residents and indeed anyone who opposed the APC’s political views are subject to repeated police invitations, night arrests, weekend detention/remands, and strategic transfers of detainees across jurisdictions. Tactics that heighten psychological trauma/pressure and frustrate access to counsel.
Such practices echo a darker chapter in Nigeria’s political history, where the uniform was used not as a symbol of public safety but as an extension of partisan will. In Oyede, my homeland the police have been drawn into local political vendettas, blurring the line between law enforcement and political enforcement.
Police brutality is not only measured by physical violence; it is also measured by misuse of authority. The humiliation of repeated summons, the fear induced by armed policemen visits, the prolonged detention of elderly citizens, and the criminalisation of civic opposition all constitute forms of institutional violence.
The case of an octogenarian and the sitting President of the Oyede Development Union who has been subjected to repeated police actions has only deepened community outrage. When elders are treated as criminals for political disagreement, the social contract is already broken.
Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than in the failed promotion of the current political arrangement. The model was decisively rejected by Oyede people. In a functioning democracy, rejection invites reflection, reassessment, and respect for popular will.
In Oyede, critics contend, rejection invited retaliation. Those who openly opposed the political experiment now find themselves targeted through arrests and criminal allegations. Civic disagreement has been recast as criminal defiance. Opposition has been reframed as subversion.
This descent into coercion coincides ominously with the recent discovery of oil and gas deposits in Oyede. Resource discovery should be a moment of collective anticipation. A chance for development, transparency, and negotiated benefit-sharing.
Instead, it has become another fault line.
Community members allege that a narrow political circle seeks to mortgage the collective interest of Oyede by positioning itself to receive or influence royalties and benefits without legitimate communal mandate.
Oyede now stands at a crossroads. It must choose between politics grounded in participation and politics enforced through punishment. No community prospers when prisons respond to protests.
No leader endures when coercion replaces consent. Oil wealth, if mishandled, becomes a curse. Policing, if politicised, becomes tyranny by uniform.
Moses Okpogode wrote from Ontario, Canada.