By Agbeze Ireke Kalu Onuma, AI-KO
In Nigeria, we do not have crises; we have “content.” We are a nation that metabolizes trauma through the absurd, systematically turning the breakdown of law and order into viral clips, memes, and WhatsApp stickers. The tragedy of our collective existence is often so profound, so suffocating in its weight, that we must either laugh or go mad.
I remember my uncle, a man who lost his life’s savings to a collapsed bank in the 90s. He never joined protest groups or wrote petitions. Instead, he became the life of every family gathering, spinning the story of his financial ruin into a masterpiece of comedy, each tragic detail – the manager’s fake smile, the bounced cheque – met with roaring laughter from his audience, including myself.
We were not laughing at him, but with him, at the sheer absurdity of a system that could fail so spectacularly. He taught me that in Nigeria, humor is not just a coping mechanism; it is a form of existential defiance.
We have overwhelmingly chosen the former, a survival mechanism that effectively, and tragically, trivializes the existential into the theatrical. We have become a republic of skit-makers, where governance is performed as high-stakes drama and the state itself is the…
The latest performance in this unending national drama unfolded only a few days ago in the Gaduwa District of Abuja, a script featuring two protagonists who could not have been more perfectly cast for a visceral clash of egos and archetypes: Nyesom Wike, the irrepressible, gravel-voiced Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), a man whose political persona is that of a bulldozer, and an unnamed but now infamous military officer, standing as a stoic sentinel over a disputed patch of earth. The setting was a classic Abuja tableau: a prime piece of real estate, allegedly a protected green area now transformed into a construction site, linked to the powerful – specifically, a former Chief of Naval Staff.
Enter Wike, the “Emperor of Rivers” now transplanted to administer the capital, a man whose governance style is less bureaucratic and more gladiatorial. He arrived not merely to inspect, but to dominate; to enforce the sacred Abuja Master Plan with the sheer, unmediated force of his personality.
But on this Tuesday, the irresistible force met an immovable object in camouflage.
This clash reminded me of a scene in my Lagos neighborhood, when the “Area Father,” a man whose authority was unquestioned, confronted a newly posted police officer at a checkpoint. The Area Father arrived with his entourage, expecting the officer to snap to attention. Instead, the young officer, stiff in his crisp uniform, stood his ground and asked to see a driver’s license the Area Father hadn’t possessed in decades.
The standoff – a silent, furious battle between informal, community-based power and the rigid, albeit often corrupt, authority of the state – paralyzed the street for an hour. We all watched from a distance, knowing we were witnessing a fundamental negotiation of power, played out not in a courtroom, but in the dust of our street.
The Abuja encounter, captured in high-definition by a scrum of news crews and phone cameras, was far more than a simple administrative dispute; it was a raw collision of two distinct Nigerian archetypes of power. On one side stood Civilian Big Man Authority – loud, performative, rooted in the “Do You Know Who I Am?” school of public administration, where a title is a cudgel. On the other stood Military “Esprit de Corps” – stoic, stubborn, and rooted in the unshakeable belief that a uniform confers an immunity that no politician, however powerful, can strip away. The dialogue, had a scriptwriter penned it, would have been criticized as being too on-the-nose. “I am the Minister!” Wike bellowed, his voice rising to that familiar, jagged crescendo that usually precedes a political demolition. “I am a commissioned officer!” the soldier retorted, a compact statement of defiance refusing to be cowed.
The drama peaked when Wike, accustomed to subordinates who tremble and bow, commanded the officer to “Shut up.” In the civilian world of Nigerian patronage, when a Big Man tells you to shut up, you not only comply, you apologize for having vocal cords in the first place. But the military operates on a different frequency, a different code. “I will not shut up,” the officer fired back, and the shock in the air was palpable.
Wike, visibly flustered and enraged by this glitch in the matrix of his authority, resorted to the ultimate Nigerian senior-man insult, a revealing deflection from the matter of law to the matter of personal chronology: “You are a very big fool. As at the time I graduated, you were still in primary school!” It was a moment of pure, unadulterated tragicomedy. Here were two official representatives of the Nigerian state – one executive, one defence – debating the legality of land ownership by measuring the timeline of their graduation dates. The substantive issue, the alleged illegal acquisition and defilement of green areas by the elite, was immediately buried under the hot debris of personal insults and wounded pride.
This controversy illustrates the tension vividly. Reports circulated that the Chief of Naval Staff, Rear Admiral Idi Abbas, accompanied by Lt. A.M. Yaremi, visited land belonging to former Naval Chief Vice Admiral Awwal Gambo, which the Federal Capital Territory Minister, Nyesom Wike, is attempting to seize. While some outlets claimed the visit occurred, my fact-checks revealed that the Chief was in Makurdi on official duties. Regardless of the factual dispute, the incident highlights how contested narratives around land ownership, military authority, and political oversight can quickly escalate into national debates.
The Defence Minister even publicly backed Lt. Yaremi after his confrontation with Wike, framing the officer’s actions as lawful and professional. This episode demonstrates how land disputes are not simply about property but about legitimacy, institutional boundaries, and the optics of power in Nigeria’s governance.
As with all Nigerian public dramas, the audience reaction was swift and voracious. The video went viral before the dust had even settled in Gaduwa. Social media erupted not with a sober concern for the rule of law or the integrity of the Abuja Master Plan, but with the frenzied analysis of the “roast.”
Who won? Did the soldier cook Wike? Did Wike handle him? Then came the secondary characters, the chorus, to extend the runtime of the national skit. Lieutenant General Tukur Buratai (retd.), a man who has had his own complex history with public perception, emerged as a sudden moral guardian of military dignity, warning that Wike’s verbal assault posed a “threat to national security.”
The Defence Headquarters, choosing mystique over clarity, released a cryptic flyer that read: “Unshaken. Unbent. Unbroken.” Suddenly, a simple land dispute had morphed into a pseudo-constitutional crisis, played out not in courtrooms or council chambers, but through press releases and Twitter graphics.
If the initial confrontation was the blockbuster’s public trailer, the subsequent scene was a masterclass in high-level, closed-door scripting. A short time after the viral dust-up in Gaduwa, the Chief of Naval Staff, accompanied by none other than A.M. Yerima, the now-notorious officer, visited the disputed land and properties linked to the former Chief of Naval Staff. This was no simple inspection; it was a potent tableau, a deliberate political pantomime staged for the nation. The message was clear: the uniformed fraternity was closing ranks. The solitary soldier on the battlefield was now flanked by the full might of the naval high command, transforming a personal act of defiance into an institutional declaration of “Unshaken. Unbent. Unbroken”. The public, ever the keen audience, immediately decoded the performance. Social media erupted with fresh commentary, with one user wryly noting they now understood the true meaning of a “Military Zone, Keep Off” sign. Another celebrated the young officer’s “integrity” and courage, framing the visit as a vindication of his stand against the political “Big Man”. This maneuver successfully recast the entire narrative, shifting the focus from the legality of the land acquisition to the more emotionally resonant, pre-cinematic theme of institutional loyalty and honor. The state, as a concept of laws, was once again defeated by the state as a network of allegiances.
If this confrontation between the Minister and the soldier feels like a familiar drama, it is because Nollywood has long been scripting its allegorical prequels. The entire Gaduwa spectacle – with its brazen land grab, its uniformed sentinel acting on “orders from above,” and the public showdown that supersedes due process – could be a modern, unrehearsed sequel to Tunde Kelani’s 1999 classic, Ṣaworoidẹ. That film, set in the fictional kingdom of Jogbo, is a masterful allegory for our political rot, depicting a ruler, Lapite, who seizes power through electoral malpractices, consolidates his rule by assassinating detractors and laundering state funds abroad, and is propped up by a council of chiefs who get a cut from his illicit activities. The parallels are almost too explicit: the powerful figure, the contested land or throne, the complicity of the inner circle, and the reduction of governance to a brutal, personal contest for dominance. Just as Lapite rules Jogbo with an iron fist, we see the same logic of impunity playing out in the green areas of Abuja, where the state is not an entity of public trust but a private fiefdom to be carved up and guarded by men with guns. The genius of Ṣaworoidẹ lies in its prescience; it diagnosed a national sickness a quarter-century ago, and the Gaduwa incident is simply a symptom of the same, untreated disease, proving that our political evolution has been a circular, not a linear, journey.
This cinematic echo is not mere coincidence but a core function of a film industry that has consistently served as the nation’s most honest, if dramatized, mirror. Nollywood does not simply tell stories; it metabolizes our collective trauma and reflects our social realities, often asking whether it distorts or accurately captures the Nigerian condition. In films ranging from the electoral thriller 4th Republic to the gritty Lagosian epic King of Boys, the industry has relentlessly explored the “privatization of the state” and the “clash of impunities” that define our existence. When we watch Eniola Salami in King of Boys navigate the underworld of politics and business, or witness the fight against electoral fraud in 4th Republic, we are seeing the same structural violence that played out in Gaduwa, only transferred from the dusty street to the silver screen. This is not entertainment for its own sake; it is a form of national self-therapy, a way of screaming through a script what we cannot fix in our statutes. The evolution of Nollywood from the village allegories of Ṣaworoidẹ to the complex godfatherism of King of Boys charts the evolution of our own understanding of power – from a localized chieftaincy affair to a sophisticated, networked monster that thrives in our modern republic.
The most tragicomic evolution, however, lies in our collective response. Nollywood has trained us to be an audience of connoisseurs in the theatre of the absurd. We have become so adept at consuming tragedy as content that the line between reality and film blurs with devastating ease. The viral video of the Minister and the soldier was immediately dissected not with the gravitas of citizens concerned for their republic, but with the fervour of movie critics debating a Nollywood “roast” – complete with memes, TikTok sound bites, and social media polls asking “Who cooked whom?” This is the ultimate twist that Nollywood has preconditioned us for: the transformation of a potential constitutional crisis into a season of blockbuster entertainment. We are all now scriptwriters, directors, and critics in the national skit, and the state’s failures have become our favourite binge-watch. The poignant commentary from Afrocritik that “freedom is not an inheritance; it is a struggle renewed every day” feels particularly sharp here. Our struggle has been outsourced to the cinema, where we fight fictional battles, leaving the real ones to be settled by who graduated from primary school first.
Yet, for all its diagnostic power, this Nollywood-ization of our reality reveals a deep cultural and political stagnation. The twist is that there is no twist. We are trapped in a loop, a feedback cycle where art imitates a life that is itself a poor imitation of art. The hopeful, clean-slate independence promised in a film like October 1, set on the eve of Nigeria’s freedom from colonial rule, has given way to the cynical, self-serving politics of the present.
The “unshaken, unbent, unbroken” mantra of the Defence Headquarters in response to the Gaduwa incident is not a statement of patriotic resolve; it is the tagline for the next episode in a never-ending series, promising more of the same drama, the same characters, and the same hollow resolutions. Our national evolution has been stunted, our potential for genuine growth supplanted by a performative cycle where the only thing that progresses is the quality of the cameras that record our decline.
Therefore, the image of the Minister and the Soldier in Gaduwa must be framed not as a breaking news story, but as the poster for a long-running national production. It is a scene that could seamlessly fit into the filmography of our disillusionment, a directorial masterpiece in the tragicomic saga of Nigerian power.
We laugh at the absurdity, we meme the insults, and we await the next episode because the alternative – to truly sit in the deafening silence after the laughter fades and confront the fragile, crumbling edifice of our state – is a horror too great to bear. The final, devastating analysis is that Nigeria’s most consistent export may no longer be oil or even Nollywood films, but a specific, self-replicating genre of power: the tragicomedy, where the players change, but the script of impunity, and our role as its captive audience, remains unrevised.
What we witnessed in Gaduwa was simply the latest, most public spasm of a system in a state of advanced decay, a single scene in a long-running national tragedy of systemic corruption whose true cost is measured not in insults traded but in blood and national security.
The very fact that a serving military officer was deployed to guard a private construction site for a retired chief is a symptom of a rot so deep it has, as organizations like Transparency International have found, directly compromised the nation’s ability to defend itself, with funds meant for bullets and armored vehicles for soldiers fighting Boko Haram often vanishing into the labyrinthine pockets of the elite. This creates a bone-chilling paradox: the same institution tasked with territorial integrity is simultaneously being bled dry from within, its rank and file sent into battle underequipped while its upper echelons are seamlessly woven into the architecture of patronage and privilege.
The confrontation, therefore, was not a clash between the state and an individual, but a grotesque stalemate between two competing visions of impunity: one, the politician’s belief that his will is law, and the other, the militarized elite’s conviction that their service – past or present – grants them a sovereign right to the national cake, a right they will defend with the very instruments of state security.
This blurring of lines between national institution and personal fiefdom finds its most devastating expression in the international sphere, far from the dusty drama of Abuja land disputes. Consider the case in the Royal Court of Jersey, which seized $8.9 million that had been siphoned off from funds specifically earmarked for the Nigerian military in its fight against Boko Haram. The money, instead of purchasing vital equipment, was funneled through a web of shell companies to benefit the family members of those in power.
This is the ghost of looted billions hovering over the Gaduwa standoff. While the officer stood his ground claiming to act with “integrity,” the global financial system was documenting how the very concept of integrity has been hollowed out by a kleptocratic class that includes both uniformed and civilian elites. They are not rival factions so much as partners in a grand, silent consensus: the state is a carcass to be picked clean, and the only true sin is being left out of the feast.
And so, the dispute over Plot 1946 reveals a system where legal and illegal are meaningless concepts, superseded by raw power and access. While Minister Wike positioned himself as the enforcer of the Abuja Master Plan, railing against the impunity of the “land grabbing” former naval chief, reports suggest his own actions may be a mirror image of the same corrupt playbook.
It has been alleged that the very land in question was part of a larger tract initially meant for serving and retired military personnel, only to be revoked by Wike and allegedly reallocated to his own political associates in what sources described as “total disregard of due process.” Thus, the tragicomic truth is laid bare: one side allegedly seized land because of military rank, while the other allegedly seizes it back for political patronage. There are no crusaders for justice in this skit, only competing appetites in a cannibalistic economy of influence.
The ultimate, heartbreaking cost of this captured state is paid not in the boardrooms or the ministry offices, but on the front lines and in the souls of the citizens. The corruption documented in defence procurement – through ghost soldiers, phantom contracts, and inflated invoices – translates directly into body bags and surrendered territories.
Soldiers have been sentenced to death for desertion after fleeing battles where they lacked proper weapons or ammunition, their lives sacrificed on the altar of graft. This systemic failure doesn’t just weaken the military; it actively fuels the very insurgencies it is meant to combat, as an ill-disciplined, abusive, and corrupt security apparatus drives disillusioned citizens into the arms of extremist alternatives.
We have become a nation where the institution tasked with defending us is simultaneously being devoured from within, and where the politicians who decry this rot are often operating their own parallel extraction schemes. We laugh at the viral videos and meme the insults because the alternative is to scream at the horrifying reality: the Nigerian state is not being governed; it is being consumed, and the Gaduwa incident was simply the sound of the predators squabbling over a choice piece of bone.
A close friend, a brilliant architect, spent two years and a small fortune navigating the “development control” office in Abuja to get approval for a modest residential building. He was passed from desk to desk, each officer a gatekeeper to a labyrinth with no exit. He finally gave up, exhausted and defeated. A year later, he drove me past a massive, ornate structure that had sprouted like a mushroom overnight on a plot designated as a green area.
“That,” he said with a bitter smile, “belongs to a general. No permits, no problems.” That was the day I truly understood that the Abuja Master Plan is not a legal document; it is a suggestion, one that applies only to those without the right uniform or the right phone number.
That a serving military officer was reportedly deployed to guard a private construction site for a retired boss speaks volumes in a language of impunity we have all become fluent in.
The Nigerian Army, an institution built to defend the territorial integrity of the nation, was in that moment reduced to a private security firm for a VIP. In a twisted sense, Wike was right to be angry about the impunity, even if his delivery was spectacularly flawed and counterproductive.
The confrontation was ultimately a stalemate of impunities. Wike represents the Impunity of the Politician: the belief that an election or appointment grants one the power to be judge, jury, and executioner on the spot, accountable to no process but his own whim. The soldier represents the Impunity of the Uniform: the belief that the military is a caste apart, answering only to “orders from above,” even if those orders are to defend private interests with state power. When Wike declared, “I will not succumb to intimidation,” and the soldier stated, “I am acting on orders,” they were both effectively saying the same thing: My source of power, my network, is bigger and more legitimate than yours.
This is where the tragedy bites deepest. In a functioning state, a violation of a Master Plan is handled by a rigorous, dispassionate administrative process: notices are served, courts are engaged, and enforcement is carried out by the police following clear legal protocols. In Nigeria, it requires the Minister to physically descend to the site, scream at a soldier, trade insults about primary school attendance, and threaten that “everybody must die here” – a rhetorical flourish, surely, but a chilling one coming from a government official. Governance has been replaced by “Field Work,” which is really just a euphemism for public, performative anger.
We laugh because the alternative is to weep at the sheer fragility of our civic order. We watch Wike call an officer a “boy,” and we watch the officer defy a Minister, and we turn it into a TikTok soundbite because it is easier to consume it as entertainment than to confront the stark reality it exposes: that we are a country where institutions are weak, men are strong, and the rule of law is only a suggestion, often drowned out by the shouting.
Yesterday afternoon, I sat in a noisy buka in Lagos, watching the Wike video on a friend’s phone. Around us, the conversation was not about land use or constitutionalism. It was a lively debate over who had “more swag” in the confrontation. A young man at the next table, a graphic designer, was already creating a meme, superimposing the faces of Wike and the soldier onto the bodies of two fighting cocks. He showed it to us, and we all laughed, a hard, sharp laughter that filled the room.
It was only later I realized that in our collective laughter, we had performed the very same metabolization of trauma the essay describes. We had turned our powerlessness into a shared joke, a moment of connection that briefly made the unbearable, bearable.
The immediate fallout of the Gaduwa fiasco is the further evisceration of the rule of law, replaced by the rule of men and their transient networks of power. The dispute over Plot 1946 will not be resolved by a court ruling or a transparent audit of land titles; its fate will be sealed by the victor of a silent, high-stakes war of influence fought in the backchannels of the Villa and the Defence Headquarters.
This outcome reinforces the most dangerous lesson in the Nigerian political playbook: that due process is for the weak, and that real power lies not in the legitimacy of your claim, but in the might of your faction. The institutional “unshaken, unbent, unbroken” response from the military was not a victory for procedure, but a declaration that the uniformed fraternity is a sovereign entity, closing ranks against civilian oversight and cementing the perception that the state is not a single entity but a fractured collection of competing fiefdoms.
Beyond the institutional damage, the fiasco has a profound social fallout: it actively tutors the populace in cynical disengagement. By transforming a potential constitutional crisis into a season of blockbuster entertainment – complete with memes, “who cooked who?” debates, and TikTok skits – the incident successfully anaesthetized public outrage. The collective energy that should have been channeled into demanding accountability for the alleged land grab and the misuse of a soldier was instead metabolized into viral content.
This is the ultimate triumph of the tragicomic: it provides a pressure valve for societal frustration, allowing us to laugh at the absurdity rather than organize against the injustice. The fallout is a citizenry that becomes ever more sophisticated as an audience of critics, but ever more powerless as a collective of reformers, perfectly playing its assigned role in the national skit.
Ultimately, the most devastating impact is the normalization of this dysfunction as our permanent condition. The Gaduwa incident is not an anomaly; it is the template. It demonstrates with crystal clarity that our governance ecosystem is now a self-sustaining loop where weak institutions produce strongmen, whose clashes further weaken institutions, in a cycle that generates no development, only drama. The fallout is the quiet acceptance that this is just how Nigeria works.
It is the realization that the land will be developed or demolished based on a phone call, that the law is a mere suggestion, and that our collective future is held hostage by the squabbles of predators over a choice piece of bone. We are left not with a resolution, but with the chilling certainty that this will happen again, in another district, over another plot, with different actors, but always, always, with the same script.
The Gaduwa incident will soon be forgotten, replaced by the next scandal, the next skit, the next viral moment. The land will either be developed or demolished, depending on who makes the deeper, more persuasive phone call to the Villa.
But the enduring image remains: a Minister and a Soldier, standing in the dust, shouting over who graduated first, while the nation they are both sworn to serve watches on a million cracked screens, laughing hysterically, desperately, just to keep from screaming.
And so, the national skit reaches its temporary curtain call. The dust in Gaduwa settles, the viral videos are archived by the next scandal, and the powerful retreat to their backrooms to make the phone calls that truly decide the fate of plots and nations.
We, the audience, are left in the echoing silence of the theater, clutching our phones, the ghost of a laugh still on our lips. But this laughter is the key to understanding our predicament, and perhaps, the faintest outline of our escape. It is not a sign of apathy, but a sophisticated, collective coping mechanism for a reality so fractured that to engage with it directly would be to risk shattering ourselves.
We have become connoisseurs of our own collapse, finding in the tragicomic a space to breathe, to connect, and to endure. The uncle who turns his financial ruin into a comedy routine, the friends in a buka debating the “swag” of a Minister and a soldier – these are not acts of surrender. They are acts of resilience, a defiant human spirit insisting on joy in the face of a system designed to extinguish it.
Yet, this brilliant cultural adaptation has a fatal flaw: it provides the powerful with the perfect cover. Our laughter, our memes, our satirical skits, become the background music to their continued plunder. They are more than happy for us to be a nation of world-class critics and commentators, so long as we never become a nation of builders and enforcers.
The real tragedy is not that we are laughing, but that our laughter has been co-opted into the machinery of distraction. The “content” we produce from our trauma anaesthetizes us to the very changes we need to make. We have mastered the art of describing the hell we are in, decorating its walls with witty graffiti, but we have forgotten the exit door, which is marked not by a clever hashtag, but by the dull, unglamorous work of institutional fortification.
The implied solution, then, is not to stop laughing, but to direct our creative energy towards a more transformative project.
The answer to the “Clash of Impunities” is not to find a bigger impunity to root for, but to systematically dismantle the stage upon which such clashes are the only drama possible. It is the unsexy, incremental work of demanding that the Development Control department has the digital transparency and legal autonomy to enforce the Master Plan without requiring a Minister’s theatrical rage.
It is the quiet insistence that the military’s chain of command is clarified to prevent a soldier from becoming a private guard, and that its procurement processes are made so transparent that a seizure of funds in Jersey becomes an impossibility, not an inevitability. It is about choosing, every day, to value the boring integrity of a process over the thrilling strength of a personality.
The true evolution we require is a shift from being a nation of audience members to a nation of stagehands and architects. We must cease celebrating the “strong man” who can shout down a soldier and start venerating the anonymous clerk who, without fanfare, follows the procedure. Our profound cultural genius, so evident in our humor and our art, must now be applied to the engineering of institutions.
Imagine channeling the creativity that produces a perfect meme into designing a foolproof land registry; imagine harnessing the collective intelligence that dissects a political roast to crowdsource the monitoring of public contracts.
This is the ultimate, quiet revolution: to build a Nigeria where the greatest spectacle is the uneventful, predictable, and dignified functioning of the state. A Nigeria where a dispute over a plot of land is resolved by a click in a public database and a court order, not by a shouting match that becomes national content.
We must write a new script, not for a skit, but for a society, one where the final, triumphant punchline is that there is no punchline – only the quiet, sustained, and breathtaking drama of a nation that finally, and resolutely, works.
