The renegade-turned-statesman evolution of Government Ekpemupolo captures a profound shift in political authority and social eminence in contemporary Nigeria.
Ebenezer Obadare
As Government (his real name) Ekpemupolo, aka Tompolo, celebrated his 54th birthday with friends and associates at an undisclosed location last month, one of the attendees was caught on video doing precisely what Nigerians normally do on such occasions: ‘shower’ the birthday boy with cash, in this case crisp 1,000 Naira notes. If those who gleefully brought the video to the attention of the Executive Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Olanipekun Olukayode, had hoped to instigate Tompolo’s arrest (“spraying” money is illegal under Section 21 of the 2007 Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Act, and at least two people, one of them a transgender celebrity, had been controversially convicted under the law), they were in for disappointment, as all they got for their efforts was a caution against “rushing to judgment” by Mr. Olukayode and a far from assuring promise to “subject the video to forensic analysis.”
Had he been a different person, Tompolo might be cooling his heels in prison right now. Yet, considering how rare it is for any Nigerian with the right “connections” to attract legal censure for a social violation, it was always a tall order that someone of his stature would be dragged before a judge to justify his action. Tompolo’s position in the current dispensation, the coincidence of one man’s implacable political ambition and the other’s unrelenting quest to consolidate a power base, would seem to make such an arraignment all but impossible.
For Tompolo is not just well-connected by Nigerian standards; at the moment, he is one of the most influential personages in the country, central to the maintenance of peace in the once volatile Niger Delta (more on which presently), and the willing face of the Bola Tinubu administration’s not particularly subtle campaign for a second term of office in 2027. The drive from the Abuja International Airport to the capital city’s Central Business District is twenty-five miles of pageantry to the newfangled alliance between Tinubu and Tompolo, with billboards hanging on every electric pole, displaying both godfather and godson united under the sign of the “PBAT DOOR-2-DOOR Movement.” Addressing a rally in Abuja to celebrate Nigeria’s Democracy Day on June 12, Tompolo insisted that the president “has delivered transformational progress in just two years” and swore to “mobilize ten million votes to return Tinubu to Aso Rock.”
Whether or not Tinubu has been a transformational president (there are many Nigerians who will disagree with that assessment), there is no question as to Tompolo’s personal transformation. Just a decade ago, he, Tompolo, was a fugitive on the run, having been declared wanted and had his bank accounts frozen, ironically by the same EFCC that now treats him like a sacred cow. The charges leveled against Tompolo at the time were in connection with his reported involvement in the activities of the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), a militant group which had increasingly throttled oil production in the region by “destroying pipelines, attacking oil installations, and kidnapping workers” and unspecified business dealings with the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA). Yet, hardly had the dogs been set on Tompolo when the authorities backtracked and, in a complete turnaround, awarded him a contract worth N48 Billion to “protect against the vandalization of oil pipelines.”
Why would a state suddenly pivot and award a mouthwatering contract to someone it had only just declared an outlaw, and on whom it had technically put a bounty? How does a man go to bed one night as a militant and then wake up the next morning a model citizen?
The answer to these important questions is to be found in the chronic incapacity of the Nigerian state to monopolize legitimate violence and, subsequently, its evident handicap relative to the many nonstate actors that, at least on paper, it is superior to. The Amnesty Program instituted by the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (2007- 2010) and then continued by his successor, Goodluck Jonathan (2010- 2015) was a child of pragmatism, motivated not so much by an earnest desire for peace in an oil-producing region that was slowly spiraling into lawlessness, as by desperation to save an industry that, by the end of 2007, had been hobbled by as much as 33 percent. Furthermore, there was a frank acknowledgment of the brutal reality that the Nigerian military was no match for militants who often had better and more sophisticated weapons, and who at any rate demonstrated superior knowledge of the physical terrain.
Tompolo, at the time Commander of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) was a prime beneficiary of this Grand Settlement, whereby tens of thousands of former militants were to be paid a monthly stipend of about 400 dollars. Almost overnight, Tompolo went from a bandit being hunted by the state to a much sought-after contractor to the same state. As control of the machinery of government had simultaneously, if fortuitously, fallen upon Tompolo’s co-ethnic, Goodluck Jonathan, after Yar’Adua’s unexpected passing, the ex-outlaw may be excused for believing that he had won the jackpot. It should be understood that Tompolo’s initial falling out with President Muhammadu Buhari (2015- 2023) at the start of the latter’s tenure was not personal but was most probably caused by a cash-strapped Buhari government’s “decision to cancel lucrative security contracts and reduce the budget to pay former militants by 70 percent.” In retrospect, the subsequent spike in violence was all the nudge Buhari needed to find the money for the former militants and restore Tompolo’s contract.
Tompolo is by no means the only individual in the Nigerian Fourth Republic to have leveraged control of violence to access and accumulate substantial financial resources and attain social eminence in the process. The other individual that readily comes to mind is another Ijaw, sixty-one-year-old Melford Dokubo Goodhead Jr., popularly known as Asari-Dokubo. Nor is the Niger Delta the only part of the country where the identified social dynamic has played out. In his excellent new study, anthropologist Wale Adebanwi uses the same subaltern-to-elite framework to analyze the rise to social prominence of Gani Adams, the former carpenter who, in part through the calculated use of violence, overcame many personal and social handicaps to become the Aare Ona Kakanfo (generalissimo) of Yorubaland.
If, according to Adebanwi, Tompolo and others teach us how “subalterns transform themselves into members of the elite,” the central insight for the student of (African) politics is in how the failure of the state to assert one of its core Weberian prerogatives—the monopoly of legitimate violence—predisposes it to outsource its authority, which in turn creates opportunity in the broadest sense for outlaws.
In that situation, not only is there little incentive to end violence, the political success and rise to eminence of a generation of outlaws becomes a source of motivation to others.
*Professor Ebenezer Obadare is Douglas Dillon Senior Fellow for Africa Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).This article was originally published by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) as part of the Diamonstein-Spielvogel Project on the Future of Democracy: Government of the Day | Council on Foreign Relations