Kogi decides on Saturday.

In six days, Kogi State will banish its vacillations and vote for one of the two leading candidates in the governorship election. The choice is between Governor Idris Wada, who is rounding up his first term, and former governor Abubakar Audu. One was a pilot, and the other a banker and accountant. The first a commoner, so to say, and the second a prince as a matter of fact. In stark ways, the two candidates are different, but for the electorate, the difference between them is blurred, and the choice difficult and foreboding. If they vote Governor Wada, whom his supporters describe as friendly, sensitive and easygoing, they will have voted continuity, conservatism and extreme mediocrity in line with his four-year record. But if they cast their ballots for Prince Audu, whom his opponents dismiss as uncouth, proud and abrasive, his antecedents as a rough-hewn and impatient moderniser show they will be voting for radical change and rapid infrastructural transformation.

The choice facing Kogi is indeed inelegant. They are in short being called upon to vote with their heads or with their hearts, to buy a house for its bold and brilliant painting or for its structural integrity; to determine whether they prefer the scaffold or the building, or beauty instead of character. Left to most Kogites, they would have preferred either a Wada with the transformative proclivity of an Audu, or an Audu with the gentle manners of the accommodating and forgetful Wada. Instead, they will pick one with all his warts, and they will groan and squirm in making that choice. But needs must when the devil drives. On Saturday, barring last minute changes and shuffles, a majority of Kogites will half vote All Progressives Congress (APC) and half vote Prince Audu, the former because they are accustomed to casting their lot with the ruling party in Abuja, and the latter because their instincts tell them only the prince can rouse the state from its somnolence and retardation. In both cases, Prince Audu will be the winner.

In the view of a significant number of Kogi voters, Governor Wada has demonstrated how terribly limited his range is: in imagination, scope of projects, and vision. He may not have disquieted the state with insensitive and dismissive comments, nor lathered it with the haughty grandstanding common with proud and impatient rulers, but in four detached years, he has almost moulded the state into a sepulchral pit of dry ideological bones, broken inner city roads and highways, and moribund factories. If he is to be rewarded with another four years, as he and his supporters have campaigned, it will not be because he had done well, but because Kogites had suspended reason. In short, the chances of reelecting the frequently amnesiac and absentee Governor Wada are not half as bright as the chances of electing a boisterous Prince Audu. For though the prince has not often talked peaceably with the people, he had outpaced all his successors in the practical art of governance and projects execution.

In their campaigns round the state, the APC ticket of Prince Audu and Abiodun Faleke has made tremendous impact in mobilising the electorate. More Kogites have defected to the APC than have crossed over to the lines of Governor Wada’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). The one-way movements have made sense. A few months ago, the contest was billed to be a close one. But fortuitously for Prince Audu, the seemingly dithering APC in Abuja has managed to assemble a cabinet that appears capable of inspiring the nation. The Buhari stock has never really gone down nationally, let alone in Kogi State which gave him a thunderous approbation in the March presidential poll. Now, that stock is high and on the rise, just days before the Kogi poll. Whether in Kogi East, West or Central, it is now more than ever likely that voters will speak with one voice; but if not with one voice, then with dissenting voices rendered in whispers — barely audible, barely significant.

In the substantial rally the APC held last week in Okene, Kogi Central, a senatorial district previously thought to be either non-committal or outrightly opposed to the APC, the crowd surprisingly warmed up to the piddling soapbox histrionics of campaigning APC leaders. Other than perhaps the animated bombast of Edo governor Adams Oshiomhole, no one had the rhetorical fluidity or charisma to rouse the people into a frenzy. President Muhammadu Buhari is being pressured to bow to the nonsensical argument by PDP politicians to dissociate himself from the Prince Audu campaign on account of the EFCC case against the challenger. It is expected that the president will resist that strange and indefensible pressure not to be in Lokoja, Kogi State for the final rally. He will know that if he doesn’t go to Lokoja, he will be sending the inadvertent message he is contemptuous of his party’s choice, and that the PDP can as well have the state — as if the president can guarantee the rectitude of past and present PDP governors in the state. Given his cult following in Kogi, should the president campaign for Prince Audu, it will probably trigger a walkover for the APC. But whether the president makes a campaign appearance in Kogi or not, the outcome of the election is not in doubt. Governor Wada has not done anything to deserve to win; and Prince Audu has mercifully not said anything to deserve to lose.

Moreover, throughout his time in office, Prince Audu’s government received less than N20bn from federal allocation, with which he founded a university and a polytechnic, and built a modern commissioners’ quarters, new and vital road arteries, Confluence Hotel, and many other significant projects. On the contrary, the two PDP governors of Kogi collected over N500bn in about 12 years and ended up grounding the state with nothing substantial to show for the money. Given the massive defections from the PDP, it appears the message has gone out loud and clear that the state’s PDP governors were an unmitigated disaster. Instead of a narrow victory, the APC is more likely to achieve a rout on Saturday, despite fears the PDP is rumoured to be buying voter cards and may be planning to use violence to disrupt polling, just as it imprudently wanted to use the bailout money — N50bn, the highest in the country — to sway votes.