By Kio Amachree
Minister Wike,
Let me say this to you plainly, from one who has actually stood in the fire you only pose in front of for the cameras: you are no Edward Seaga. You are no Michael Manley. And Port Harcourt, for all its swagger and all your boasting, is no Trenchtown. It is no Kingston, Jamaica.
I do not say this from a textbook. I say it because I have lived it. I have seen the bad old days of gang politics and political warfare in Jamaica with my own eyes — the garrison elections of the 1970s and 1980s, when Seaga’s JLP and Manley’s PNP turned entire communities into armed camps, when Trenchtown and Tivoli Gardens buried their young by the hundreds in a single election cycle, when a man’s postal code decided whether he lived or died.
I have had five guns pointed directly at my head in that Jamaica. Only God’s mercy kept me standing here, decades later, writing this letter to you. That is not a boast. It is a warning, from someone who knows exactly what the real thing costs and exactly how far you are from it.
Because you, Minister, are not that. You are theatre. You are noise. You are a man who talks too much, who drinks too much, who loves the limelight so much that a “thank-you visit” or a “Rainbow Coalition” press appearance seems to matter more to you than the government of over five million Rivers people whose lives you keep holding hostage to your ego.
You got here the easy way – the ill-gotten wealth, the party structures inherited rather than built, the political jobs handed to you because you knew where the levers were, not because you ever stood where the guns were pointed.
The yardies and the thugs I met in Jamaica’s garrison politics, the men who killed and died for Seaga and for Manley without a second thought, would eat you alive within a week. You would not survive one afternoon in Tivoli Gardens in 1980. You have built your entire career on the assumption that you never will have to.
That is the difference between a political don and a political bully. Seaga and Manley, whatever their sins – and they were many – commanded loyalty that men were willing to die for. That loyalty was not manufactured. It was not bought with federal contracts, LGA chairmanships, or “thank-you tours” through Ahoada West. It was carved into the ground with blood, generation after generation, in a country that paid a horrifying price for it.
You have never earned that kind of loyalty and you never will, because what you offer is patronage, not conviction. No one is going to die for you the way those Jamaicans died for their dons. Strip away the FCT budget and the Aso Rock access, and see how many of your “foot soldiers” are still standing behind you.
And now look at what you have done to Rivers State. You installed Fubara, then spent two years trying to strangle the government you built, dragging the state through an illegal impeachment attempt, a six-month state of emergency that suspended democracy itself, and a humiliating forced surrender of the very political machinery you claim was never in doubt.
You go from local government to local government now, declaring victory, assuring Tinubu of Rivers in 2027, talking about a “Rainbow Coalition” as if Rivers people do not remember exactly how that coalition was built – over a governor’s neck. You mistake submission for loyalty and fear for love. They are not the same thing, and Rivers State will teach you that lesson whether you are ready for it or not.
Rivers State will bring you down. You will not establish a dynasty in that state. Every knot you tie around Fubara’s neck, around the Assembly’s neck, around the party’s neck, is a knot you are quietly tying around your own. History does not remember the loudest man in the room. It remembers who was left standing when the noise stopped. Come down to earth, Minister, before it is too late – for Rivers State, and for you.
