FCT Minister, Nyeson Wike deceives himself to be the only political vandal on the political space. He believes in power of corruption to achieving his demonic plans.
The recent declaration by the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Chief Nyesom Wike, that the Federal Capital Territory will not repeat what he condescendingly described as the “political mistake of 2023” by voting massively for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in 2027, deserves a rigorous, dispassionate and intellectually sophisticated deconstruction. While political mobilization is a legitimate democratic exercise, the framing, logic and philosophical underpinnings of the Minister’s Bwari pronouncement represent a dangerous assault on democratic conscience, electoral autonomy and the very idea of the FCT as a cosmopolitan microcosm of Nigeria.
First, the fundamental sophistry in the Minister’s rhetoric must be exposed. To describe the democratic choice of 281,717 citizens of the Federal Capital Territory who voted for Mr. Peter Obi in 2023, as against 90,902 who voted for President Tinubu, as a “mistake” and an “error” is not only intellectually dishonest but democratically heretical. In democratic theory, from Locke to Rousseau to Dahl, the will of the people, expressed through free ballot, cannot by definition be a mistake. It is the sovereign verdict. It may be inconvenient to the ruling elite, it may be contrary to the expectation of the establishment, but it cannot be delegitimized as an error to be corrected through political engineering. What Wike labels as a mistake was in fact the most authentic exercise of electoral autonomy in the history of the FCT. The people of Abuja, comprising civil servants, artisans, indigenous Gbagyi people, students and middle-class professionals, made a conscious, unmonetized choice. To now gather a coalition of political jobbers in Bwari to declare that this choice will be reversed is to announce a project of voter coercion and democratic gaslighting.
Secondly, the Minister’s conceptualization of political party as a mere “vehicle” that one disembarks from upon attaining office reveals a profound crisis of political philosophy and party ideology. This transactional conceptualization strips political parties of their ideological content, manifesto and moral contract with the electorate. If party is merely a vehicle, then what happens to the manifesto upon which voters gave their mandate? What happens to party discipline, party supremacy and programmatic accountability? This is not political sagacity; this is political opportunism elevated to doctrine. It explains why governance in Nigeria has become bereft of ideology and full of defections. When a sitting Minister who is supposedly still a member of the Peoples Democratic Party is leading a Rainbow Coalition for the All Progressives Congress, while openly sharing positions such as the FCT Universal Basic Education Board to compensate those who step down, we are no longer in the realm of democracy but in the bazaar of patronage. This is the monetization of conscience and the commodification of political loyalty.
Thirdly, the attack on the incumbent Senator of the FCT, Senator Ireti Kingibe, as absent and ineffective, while presenting his own anointed candidate, former Senator Philip Aduda, as the man “who knows when you are sleeping and when you are crying,” is a study in political irony and historical amnesia. Senator Aduda represented the FCT for twelve years, from 2011 to 2023. The question that any serious political sociologist would ask is: what did Abuja look like after twelve years of Aduda? Were the rural roads in Abaji, Kuje, Kwali, Bwari and Gwagwalada tarred? Were the primary healthcare centres in interior villages functional? Was youth unemployment addressed? The FCT voted against the old order precisely because it was tired of recycling. To now present the same recycled elite as the new face of hope is to insult the political intelligence of the Abuja electorate. Senator Ireti Kingibe may have her own limitations, but she emerged from a popular uprising against the very political class that Wike now seeks to reimpose. To dismiss her with a wave of hand at a staged rally is to demonstrate contempt for the voters who elected her.
Fourthly, the Minister’s promise of the Gombe-Kubwa road by December as justification for political loyalty is a classic illustration of what political economists call the weaponization of public goods. Roads, schools, hospitals and water are not gifts from a benevolent emperor to be exchanged for votes. They are entitlements funded by taxpayers’ money, by oil revenue that belongs to all Nigerians, and by loans that future generations will repay. To say “I will give you road, therefore you must give me votes” reduces citizenship to clientelism. The people of Bwari and Kubwa do not need a Minister to authoritatively tell them they will do Christmas on a road. They need a system where roads are built because they are a right, not because an election is approaching. The FCT’s budget is not Wike’s personal largesse; it is public patrimony.
Furthermore, the Rainbow Coalition itself, as described, is an assemblage of contradictions. It brings together APC and PDP stakeholders, traditional rulers, youth groups and area council chairmen. The sociological question is: what is the ideological cement that holds this rainbow? What is its manifesto for the FCT? Is it about affordable housing for civil servants who can no longer afford rent in the city they administer? Is it about resettlement and compensation for original inhabitants whose lands have been taken without adequate recompense? Is it about the cost of living crisis that has made Abuja one of the most expensive cities for ordinary workers? Or is it merely about capturing the FCT as a political trophy for 2027? When a coalition is defined not by ideas but by opposition to a previous electoral outcome, it is not a coalition; it is a conspiracy against electoral memory.
The Minister cautions residents against “political gamblers.” Yet, what is more of a gamble than a politics that abandons its own party, that uses public projects as electoral bait, and that seeks to overturn a clear electoral mandate through threats and patronage? The real political gamblers are those who gamble with the trust of the people, who believe that the hunger in the land can be cured by slogans, that the anger of 2023 can be erased by December roads.
The FCT has always been a special political territory. Section 299 of the Constitution ascribes to it a status akin to a state. Its voting pattern in 2023 was not an anomaly; it was a sociological statement. Abuja is home to the most educated, most politically aware and most economically squeezed segment of Nigeria. They are civil servants whose salaries cannot take them home, students who cannot afford accommodation, and small business owners who pay multiple taxes. They voted their conscience in 2023 because they are the ones who feel the impact of governance most directly. To threaten to “lock down FCT for Tinubu in 2027” is to threaten to lock down conscience itself.
Finally, democracy thrives on competition, not coercion; on persuasion, not intimidation; on performance, not promises. If the present administration has performed, let its performance speak in the lives of the people, in the cost of food, in the affordability of housing, in the security of lives in Kuje and Bwari, in the quality of schools in the FCT. Let the people decide freely whether their lives are better in 2026 than they were in 2023. That is the only legitimate referendum.
The people of the FCT will not be stampeded into amnesia. They remember 2023 not as a mistake but as a moment when they spoke without inducement. Any attempt to rewrite that history through a rainbow that has no colours of ideology will fail the test of legitimacy.
Abuja must be allowed to remain the conscience of the nation, not the conquered territory of any political emperor.
Muhammad is a commentator on national issues
