“WHAT happened between Minister [Federal Capital Territory, FCT] Wike and the officer [Navy Lt. AM Yerima] is unfortunate. When he got there [site of a disputed land in Abuja], the officer explained that he was simply obeying orders given to him. Wike should not have exchanged words with the officer; he ought to have addressed his concerns through the officer’s superiors. He [Wike] is our colleague, and Wike could have reached out to us to resolve whatever issue. The officer’s action was lawful – he was trained to be disciplined, loyal, and obedient to orders. Therefore, the young officer only carried out his duty worthy of commendation. He did not commit any offence under military regulations; he merely obeyed a lawful order and followed due process. If you observe carefully, he spoke respectfully and conducted himself properly.
“There is, therefore, no offence under military law for which he should be charged. Wike should not have engaged him in an altercation, especially out of respect for the uniform he was wearing. Anyone who disrespects a soldier indirectly disrespects the President, who is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. There is, therefore, no basis for any punishment against the officer. This is not about supporting the military to act disrespectfully towards civilians. The Minister should understand that every officer has superiors. I gathered that he [Wike] called the Chief of Defence Staff, who advised him to wait for an investigation.
“However, he did not wait and instead went straight to the site. As a leader, he ought to have exercised patience and waited for the outcome of the investigation. Wike also contacted the Chief of Naval Staff, who assured him that an investigation would be conducted. Yet again, he did not wait. It was supposed to be a one-day inquiry, but he chose to go there and confront them [Navy guards]. Now that the Chief of Naval Staff has visited the area-since it involves a land dispute-the matter will be investigated to know who owns the lawful documents. If the land has been revoked, there are established procedures to be followed diplomatically. We [presumably the defence ministry] have not received any formal complaint from Wike, but I called him after the video went viral and advised that he should have spoken with me before going there, rather than confronting the officers directly”.
I have taken the time to reproduce the words of Alhaji Bello Matawalle, the Minister of State for Defence because of what I think the published words of the Minister represented. He spoke about further investigation on the matter, but as can be gleaned from the tone and tenor of the statement, the matter is closed and the Naval officer should have nothing to worry about. Lt. Yerima, it can be deduced acquitted himself very well, and he was professional in the manner he conducted himself in the very public confrontation with a Super Minister who also is a loquacious public servant. In case you are still interested in corroborating that the matter is effectively closed, you may need to read the position of the Defence Minister, Alhaji Mohammed Badaru who said that his Ministry and the Armed Forces are lock-in-step, and “will always protect our officers on lawful duty.
Badaru added that “we will not allow anything to happen to him so far as he is doing his job, and he [Yerima] is doing his job greatly well”. The Defence Minister was speaking at a ministerial briefing for the 2026 Armed Forces Remembrance Day in Abuja. Let that sink in. You could call it esprit-de-corp, but some retired army generals from the north and south of the country including former chief of defence staff [CDS], Gen. Lucky Irabor and former chief of army staff [COAS], Gen. Tukur Burutai, have spoken up, siding with Lt. Yerima. They called for a public apology from Wike to Yerima and the Commander-in-Chief, Tinubu, for dishonouring a military officer commissioned by the C-in-C.
Some personages whose voices count on significant public spats as the Wike – Yerima confrontation over a piece of a landed property in Abuja last week Tuesday, have weighed in on the matter through public statements. Some of them are lawyers, both senior and junior. Some of them enjoy name recognition, while others are aspiring to be known. A few argued in favour of Wike by copiously quoting the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria [as amended], while many others pilloried the minister, also using the the same Constitution while harping on due process, the imperatives of the rule of law, and objection to a resort to self help as appeared to be the case with Minister Wike. Like economists, lawyers seldom, really never, agree on any issue even when the position of the law appears straightforward to the so-called ‘unlearned persons’. So, for most of the past week, lawyers engaged in one of the only things that they are good at – lawyering.
If you’re seeking illumination and sanity, read their lawyering, but do not take their bombastic disputations to heart. Their arguments are usually driven by convenient partisanship masked with law and the constitution. By the way, is it not curious and deafening that one week after the Abuja fiasco, not even one of the almost 50 Federal Executive Council [Cabinet] colleagues of Wike has publicly spoken in his defence or favour? Does this loud silence speak to how they regard and relate with and to Wike? And for the president, Tinubu, who employed him on our behalf Wike may just be above approach, reprimand or removal from the Cabinet for obvious reasons.
Wike is almost untouchable because of the past [2023] and because of the future [2027], no matter what he does. Tinubu is single-mindedly focused on politics and winning elections by any means including grabbing, snatching and running away with any desired and available electoral mandate. For him it is the Machiavelli School – the end justifies the means. Wike is a fit and proper person in that school to have in your corner. Tinubu ‘discovered’ Wike in 2023. Wike was just at the sunset of his governorship of the oil-rich Rivers state in the Niger Delta region of the country. He has had a public fallout with his People’s Democratic Party [PDP] which had had a stranglehold on the democratic structure of that state since the advent of this republic in 1999. Tinubu desperately wanted a foothold in that strategic state which also boasts of a rich harvest of votes during elections.
In the nature of our elections, the candidate of the opposition All Progressives Congress [APC] was reportedly desirous of being awarded at least 25% of the votes cast in that state during the presidential election of 2023. Before then APC was an anathema to the people of Rivers state, going by the official vote tabulations of the ‘independent’ National Electoral Commission [INEC] in preceding balloting. Wike, besides being a stalwart of the PDP, delivered for the opposition candidate Tinubu to spite his own presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. In fact, one of the governors of the APC in the north [Kebbi state, if my recollections are correct] expressed shock at the level of delivery of the state to Tinubu by Wike.
He said that the APC begged for 25% of the votes for their presidential candidate but instead got an outright massive and inexplicable win. The PDP won the subsequent governorship poll by a landslide. So, Wike paid with the votes of the people of Rivers state for the post he occupies today in a supposedly opposition regime at the centre, and for what is currently being described as his ‘untouchable’ status, no matter what he does. No doubt, he will be sorely needed for the 2027 election.
Thus far, Wike has been a person of concern in his political career starting from his election as the chairman of Obiakpor council area of Rivers state. And he has been a minister of particular concern since he was appointed to superintendent the highly sought after ministry of the federal capital territory in August, 2023. Before the clash of last week Tuesday, controversies had dogged the official and unofficial conducts of Minister Wike. He installed Sim Fubara to succeed him as Rivers state governor in 2023 but soon fell out with him. Earlier this year he was linked to the political violence in that same state which culminated in the declaration of a state of emergency, suspension of all democratically elected officers including the governor, deputy governor, and members of the house of assembly for six months by President Tinubu.
The issue at stake as confirmed by Wike himself is the political control of the state. The minister said that he nominated all those elected to all critical offices in Rivers, bought their nomination and expression of interest forms, and installed them in office. So, who owns the state should never be in doubt. A fully chastened Fubara has now been restored to office. It has been suggested that the conditions for his return were that he will not defect to the APC unless as an ordinary member instead of the conventional leader of the party, and that he will not seek a second term which had been the norm with previous governors of the state.
In the same Rivers state, Wike has quarrelled with everybody of note including former president, Goodluck Jonathan and his wife, Patience, who were his benefactors, and his predecessor in office as governor, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi. Elsewhere, he is in enmity with former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, who he accused of depriving him of the presidential ticket of the PDP in 2023. For this reason, he worked for the defeat of his party’s candidate in the 2023 presidential election. He has been at daggers drawn with the PDP since he lost the primary election for the selection of its presidential candidate in 2022. Wike has been at war with the supposed mainstream of his party for years, sometimes with justification.
He believes that he has been dealt a bad hand by the party honchos in spite of his being the sole sponsor of the PDP when the party was left for dead after it was ousted from office in 2015. And he was right. On Saturday, Wike and his supporters were finally allegedly expelled from the PDP. He scoffed at the expulsion. Wike is an ‘ikiri’, an Igbo name for a tenacious animal which never lets go of anything in its grip. The prognosis is that the PDP will be the ultimate losers. A court had ruled against holding the convention in Ibadan, Oyo state, where Wike and co were expelled. Moreover, the conventional thinking in Nigeria of today is that Wike and the APC he is working for have overbearing influence on the judiciary. There are judges who are routinely referred to as Wike’s judges especially in Abuja.
Wike regularly hosts media chats on television where he appears cantankerous and indecurous. And they come at a pricey cost to the FCT treasury. By the way, less than two months after he emerged as minister in 2023, Wike got the president to unshackle him from the restrictive treasury single account policy. So, he uses internally generated revenue of the capital territory as he pleases, outside of prying eyes. He has been enmeshed in scandals around revocation of landed assets in the territory and reallocation of same to cronies and family members including his children; misuse of public resources including taking his children with him on foreign official trips at the public’s expense; breach of the declaration of assets by not disclosing his association with houses in the United States allegedly acquired in the name of his wife who is a justice of the Appeal Court, and which ownership were secretly transferred to their children; misuse of government assets to host the activities of a faction of his PDP which included the recent inauguration of a parallel PDP board of trustees members at the federal capital development authority’s conference hall, among others. Wike has consistently and vigorously denied any wrong-doing.
Back to last week. The spat between Wike and Lt. Yerima remains particularly ominous, especially coming in the wake of an alleged coup plot by mostly northern elements in the military. The government has said that the allegedly arrested military officers were being processed over disciplinary issues, though it has struggled to convince Nigerians with this contrary narrative. Meantime, the vocal and stout defence of Lt. Yerima by a few political office holders of northern extraction including the defence ministers of Tinubu’s regime should be concerning.
And the concern was brought into sharper focus by a foreboding social media message posted on the X [Tweeter] account of the Nigerian Defence Headquarters [DHQ] in the heat of the Wike/Yerima face-off. It read in bold and shouting letters: “IT IS AN HONOUR TO SERVE IN THE NIGERIAN MILITARY. UNSHAKEN. UNBENT. UNBROKEN.” Make of this what you like. Now the national assembly is formulating a law to make the military answerable to all cadres of the civilian authorities, not just the president who is their Commander-in-Chief. In a manner of speaking, may Wike not be Nigeria’s Achilles Heels in our 26 years of fragile and seemingly fracturing democracy.
