By Tony Iwuoma
This is about power, paranoia and the politics of staying relevant. In Nigerian politics, there are loud men, and then there is Nyesom Wike, mere mention reroutes conversations and rearranges loyalties.
Admirers call him fearless and effective. Critics describe him as vindictive, ungrateful, and power-drunk. Yet the heat around Wike is about personality, permanence, and peace, or the lack of it.
Politics is a survival theatre. So, the question is not whether Wike is wicked in the biblical sense, but whether he has become a prisoner of the very power rituals he perfected.
Wike did not come from the school of consensus. He rose from Rivers State politics, an arena where hesitation is fatal and mercy is mistaken for weakness. From council chairman to chief of staff, from minister to two-term governor, he learned the core Nigerian political lesson early: control the structure or be consumed by it.
This schooling explains his style. He does not merely seek power; he seeks insurance against irrelevance. Every move is calibrated to avoid the quiet after office that swallows yesterday’s giants.
Wike’s most disruptive legacy may be his mastery of party straddling without penalty. After the PDP presidential primary, he did what Nigerian politicians usually do quietly, but he did it loudly. He stayed PDP by card, opposed its flag-bearer in practice, aligned tactically with the APC, and emerged not diminished but rewarded.
This was not defection; it was domination. It proved an uncomfortable truth: in Nigeria, ideology is decorative. Power negotiates its own absolution. Wike did not break the rules; he exposed how conditional they are.
To admirers, this was genius. To critics, opportunism. To the system, it was a precedent, dangerous precisely because it worked.
Wike’s alliances tend to end the same way: loudly, personally, and permanently. Amaechi, once principal. Atiku, once party leader. Fubara, his own successor. The pattern is unmistakable. Wike thrives in partnerships only while retaining leverage. The moment autonomy appears, conflict follows.
Supporters call it self-preservation. The colder reading is political absolutism, an intolerance for rival power centres, even those he created.
In mature systems, godfathers retire into counsel. In Nigeria, godfathers fear silence. When protégés grow wings, suspicion replaces trust. Control must be reasserted, or the relationship destroyed. Wike’s post-office battles suggest not merely a desire for influence, but obedience that outlives tenure.
Many stories are woven around Wike, real or imagined. The Rolls-Royce debate was never about a car. It was about what luxury communicates in a hungry republic. No court has convicted Wike of corruption; legality is not the point. Optics are.
In a nation wrestling inflation, fuel hikes, and insecurity, extravagance becomes political speech. It can signal confidence, or contempt, depending on the listener. The whiskey narratives, sometimes exaggerated and often weaponised, function the same way. Literal or not, they paint a ruler insulated from ordinary anxieties. The truth is that excess, in Nigeria, is not accidental; it is performative power.
Then there is identity. Rivers State sits in a complex cultural space, historically linked to the Niger Delta and, in some tellings, to broader Igbo civilisation. Over time, Wike has forcefully distanced himself from any Igbo political identification, especially when such affiliation became electorally inconvenient.
This is not unique, but it is revealing. In Nigerian politics, identity is currency. It is highlighted or hidden, depending on the market. Wike’s insistence on dissociation underscores a hard truth: heritage bows to ambition. Identity becomes strategy.
Perhaps, the least discussed, but most psychologically telling, dimension of Wike’s public life is his love for oaths. At different moments, he publicly invoked curses upon himself and his children if he ever betrayed allies, undermined successors, or did the very things he now stands accused of doing.
But here is the paradox: what happens when a man’s future contradicts his own oath?
Whether one believes in spiritual causality or not, the psychological toll is real. This may explain the restlessness, the constant need to fight, to explain, to dominate the narrative. Peace is difficult when you have sworn against yourself. Even if the curses have no metaphysical effect, they create an inner courtroom where the accused is always present.
Politics is combat, but it is also arithmetic. How many enemies can one sustain at once? How many fronts can remain open before strategy collapses into exhaustion?
Wike currently manages wars across party lines, state structures, national alliances, and public opinion. Each conflict requires energy. Each retaliation multiplies resistance. At some point, the cost exceeds the gain.
Nigerian politics tolerates aggression, but not perpetual instability. The fire that frightens rivals can isolate its owner. History shows that men who fight everyone eventually stand alone, armed but cornered.
To call Wike wicked is to moralise what is, at heart, existential politics. Wickedness implies cruelty for pleasure. Wike’s actions appear driven not by malice but by fear of erasure.
He does not destroy randomly. He retaliates strategically. His wars are territorial, not ideological. He fights to remain visible.
That does not absolve the damage. Institutions corrode under vendettas. Governance suffers when grudges rule. A nation pays for leaders who never disarm.
But Wike is not an anomaly. He is an honest mirror of a system that worships dominance and distrusts quiet strength.
Nyesom Wike’s political ascent is inseparable from the long list of powerful hands that lifted him, many of which he later wrestled to the ground. It was Senator Azu Mata who first introduced him into the inner mechanics of Rivers politics. Sir Peter Odili and his wife, Justice Mary Odili, opened wider doors, embedding him firmly within the state’s ruling elite. Before his famous alliance and fallout with Rotimi Amaechi, President Goodluck Jonathan and Dame Patience Jonathan elevated Wike to the national stage, appointing him Minister of State for Education and later full minister, long before Amaechi became his principal adversary, and before his bruising rupture with Atiku Abubakar. The pattern is difficult to ignore: mentors become expendable once Wike acquires independent power. Gratitude, in his political lexicon, appears transactional, not permanent.
This history inevitably casts a long shadow over his current alignment with President Bola Tinubu. Today’s partnership is useful, even mutually beneficial, but Wike’s past suggests that once he feels constrained, diminished, or politically fenced in, yesterday’s benefactor can quickly become tomorrow’s problem. Tinubu may not be next, but precedent says he cannot assume immunity.
In the current atrophying feud between Nyesom Wike and Governor Siminalayi Fubara, sentimentality is a luxury Rivers politics does not permit. Fubara’s persistent inability to break Wike’s iron-clad hold on the state, despite wielding constitutional executive powers, projects not restraint but weakness. Authority unused is authority forfeited. By picking a fight he was structurally unprepared to finish, Fubara walked into a duel with a man who treats intimidation as political currency.
Wike is not a conventional godfather content with phone calls and press statements; he is a political swashbuckler with no qualms openly threatening to break into state structures, bend institutions, and weaponise loyalty networks built over decades. Fubara’s hesitation has emboldened Wike and exposed the limits of executive power without political muscle.
The brutal truth is this: a governor who cannot assert dominance should never have started a war with a man who thrives in chaos and fears no escalation. In this contest, blinking late may cost far more than blinking early.
In the short term, Wike remains formidable. His centrality to power ensures relevance. His unpredictability keeps allies cautious and opponents alert.
In the medium term, the law of diminishing returns looms. Politics eventually demands transition, from enforcer to elder, from warrior to custodian. Those who refuse the shift peak without legacy.
If Wike does not consciously evolve, if he continues to collect enemies, deny rest, and carry the weight of his own words, his story risks becoming one of victories without peace.
Objectively speaking, Nyesom Wike is not wicked. He is brilliantly adaptive, relentlessly territorial, and deeply allergic to political silence, but succeeding in ways few have dared, and fewer have survived.
But power exacts interest. Public curses return as private noise. Endless wars exhaust even the strongest generals.
The final test before Wike is not another battle. It is this:
Can a man who swore against himself learn to lay down arms and still feel alive?
In Nigerian politics, that may be the rarest victory of all.
*Iwuoma is a commentator on public issues
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