Ketenfe was an ancient town that used to be feared for its wealth and military prowess many many years ago, when drums spoke louder than men. There lived seven kingmakers who believed they were greater than the crown they served.
Their commission was to be the hands that lifted kings to the throne and the whispers that buried them. Men feared them. Women lowered their voices and gazes when their names passed like wind through the market.
It was not that their king, Oba Adegbola, was a tyrant. No. His crime was that he ascended the throne as a rich trader and used the throne to expand his trade. The kingmakers watched their young royal father establish trading points beyond the borders of his kingdom. He brought his fellow traders into Ketenfe and made them chiefs and royal advisors. Oba Adegbola began to rule not just with the narrow counsel of the seven, but with the advice of his business partners. This whittled down the influence of the seven kingmakers, leaving them dangerously restless.
“Who is a king,” said Balogun, the leader of the conspirators“if not the clay we mold?”
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“What is a crown,” replied Apena, his eyes spewing angry fire, “if we decide to use it to drink hot pap, its beads be damned?”
They laughed. The kind of laughter that cracks like dry wood and leaves a bitter smell. They poured more fuel on the fire of their conspiracy.
They met at night, when honourable men were in bed. They poured libations not to the ancestors, but to their own ambition. They wove stories of madness around the king—said he spoke to unseen spirits, that he had offended the gods, that his reign was making the ancestors angry
But a lie, no matter how finely dressed will limp, no matter how fast it runs, truth will outrun it.
They sent evil whispers into the town, expecting them to grow teeth but their shame responded with a a wide toothless smile. The stories remained wild until they became jokes at ‘opon ayo’ and pamwine joints.
Still, the seven boasted.
“We will remove him,” said Agbaakin, swinging his staff and then hitting the dusty floor with it, with all the violence in his heart. “Before the next full moon, he will be a distant memory.”
“Kings come and go,” said Aworo. “But we,” he tapped his chest, “we are forever.” He had forgotten that forever is a dangerous word.
The day came when they gathered in full regalia, beads heavy with arrogance, voices sharp with rehearsed rage. They stood before Oba Adegbola and pronounced him unfit. They expected him to tremble, to plead, to bow before the invisible knife they held.
But the king smiled.
Not the smile of a defeated man. No. The calm smile of one who had already seen the end of a story.
“Have you finished?” he asked.
They blinked. They could not believe the king’s confidence.
The palace was suddenly full—farmers, hunters, traders, mothers with children strapped to their backs. The people had come. Not summoned by gong, but drawn by something deeper than command.
“Did you say I am no longer king,” Adegbola continued, his voice ominously steady. “Then tell me, who will you crown?”
The seven exchanged glances. They had planned the fall, not this landing.
“Anyone,” Balogun said quickly. “A better man who understands the order of things.”
“And who will choose this ‘better man’?” the king asked.
“We do!” they chorused.
The people stirred. A murmur rose, not loud, but heavy.
An old woman stepped forward, her back bent from toil and age. She looked Balogun straight in the eye and asked,“And who chose you?”
Silence.
The seven felt it then, the ground shifting beneath their shaking feet. They tried to speak, to reclaim the moment, but their words scattered like frightened birds.
Oba Adegbola raised his hand, and the crowd quieted.
“You were given power,” he said, not with anger, but with something colder. “Not to own the throne, but to protect it. You mistook the path for the destination. You thought nobody will ever ask questions about your diabolical hold on Ketenfe, your evil noose around the people’s neck.” The king then passed a verdict swift like a blade .
The seven kingmakers were stripped, not just of clothes, but of titles, of voice, of farmlands and hurled into exile. They were led out at dusk, before the sky could decide between light and darkness. As they crossed the boundary between reverred men and yesterday’s men, the birds still sang, the iroko tree behind them stood still, as it always had, unmoved by their rise and fall.
They learnt too late that power is like a borrowed ‘agbada’, it must be worn and handled with care because one day, one can be asked to return it—naked.”
That fall you just read? It is not trapped in a dusty Yoruba town. It walks among us, wearing agbada, clutching microphones, issuing press statements that sound like thunder but land like drizzle.
Nigeria’s opposition parties today look eerily like those seven kingmakers: loud in confidence, thin in strategy, and strangely surprised when the ground not only shifts but threatens to swallow their starched pride.
Here are seven things they got wrong.
1. Noise is not influence
Like Balogun and his men, the opposition has mastered the art of talking at Nigerians, not with them. Press conferences, social media storms, fiery interviews—plenty sound, very little resonance. But politics, like the marketplace, rewards those who listen. While they shouted “we will unseat them,” the people quietly asked, “and then what?” Silence should not have followed. How about specific strategies on how to employ more doctors and nurses and teachers? How about what opposition will do differently to stop kidnapping and retrieve our national pride and flag from terrorists? How about a genuine road map to food security and food export? Why is every press conference not about that? Imagine one press conference, one far reaching solution to one problem. Imagine how the halls of change would have filled and overflowed .
2. Planning for the fall, not the future.
Those kingmakers had plans to dethrone, not how to replace. Nigeria’s opposition has often behaved the same way—united only by a shared desire to remove the ruling party, but deeply divided on what comes after. Remove who? Replace him with who? Nigerians are too exhausted from trusting Sade Adu’s ‘ Smooth Operators’. They have learned to distrust empty transition illusions. We got here somehow, didn’t we?
3. Past rapes birthed present lessons
Coalitions stitched in hotel rooms, alliances sealed over handshakes and hyped by headlines, yet the ordinary voter, like the old woman in the courtyard, keeps asking, “Who chose you?” When people feel excluded, they disengage or worse, they resist quietly by avoiding the ballot box altogether, accepting their painful fate.
4. Victims don’t forget
The Yorubas say the person who defecated may forget but the one who cleared the faeces never forgets.
Nigerians remember. Opposition figures who once held power cannot pretend to be strangers to the system they now condemn. Past records, old speeches, previous failures, these linger like stubborn harmattan dust on our furniture. You cannot shout “change” when your own footprints are still fresh in yesterday’s sand.
5. An opposition divided against itself…
Before the kingmakers even reached the palace, they were already suspicious of one another. That same disease runs deep in our polity. Internal wrangling, factional splits, ego battles disguised as ideology. Too many opposition leaders wanting to become President and Vice President at the same time have smothered genuine ideology, if ever there was one. Tickets are contested more fiercely than policies. Court cases replace strategies to build national spread. By the time they face the ruling party at the polls, they are already wounded from self-inflicted cuts.
6. Opposition that disappear or dissolve into ruling party after election day.
“We are forever,” the kingmakers had said. Nigerian opposition parties sometimes act with that same illusion. They assume relevance is automatic, that discontent will always deliver votes to their doorstep. But politics is a shifting river. Parties rise, fracture, merge, disappear. Voters are not loyal to ever changing logos. Nigerians are tired of following leaders who disappear at crossroads, leaving them stranded.
7. The quiet verdict of a tired people.
The kingmakers expected applause; they met silence, then resistance. In Nigeria, the verdict is often quiet—low turnout, unexpected losses, apathy that speaks louder than protest. When citizens begin to see all sides as variations of the same story, they withdraw belief and without belief, no opposition can stand.
There is a lesson sitting quietly beneath all this noise.
Power, as the Ketenfe failed palace coup reminds us, is a borrowed cloth. The ruling party wears it today. The opposition hopes to wear it tomorrow. But the owners are neither of them. The owners are the people—watching, remembering, waiting.
Until Nigeria’s opposition learns to listen before speaking, to build before boasting, to unite before contesting, they will remain like those seven men,bewildered, exiled not by decree, but by overconfidence and unpreparedness.
It is not enough to want to dethrone the king, you must know everything the king knows and most importantly, the people must follow you all the way to the palace and stay with you until the crown is retrieved. It is either all that or you cross that boundary into the forest of yesterday’s men.
The views expressed by contributors are strictly personal and not of Law & Society Magazine.
