When I said recently that I do not see Nasir El-Rufai as significantly different from Nyesom Wike, the WhatsApp platform reacted as though I had committed an abomination. To some, it felt like calling an “angel” a “devil.” The outrage was instant. But politics, like memory, is a poor archivist, and a closer look suggests both men have lived double lives in the public imagination. They are heroes to some, villains to others, and rarely both at once for the same audience.
Wike is the perfect case of how quickly the portrait is repainted. The same man now labeled an APC collaborator was once celebrated as the last man standing for the PDP, the one who bankrolled the opposition when figures like Atiku had gone quiet. At that moment, his gift for throwing jabs, his emotional charges against Buhari and Amaechi, made him the face of resistance. Without Wike, many argued, the opposition would have gone extinct, and democracy, as political scientists remind us, cannot breathe without a viable opposition. Governors like Samuel Ortom and Bala Mohammed orbited him with a loyalty that looked almost filial.
And then there was the concrete. Rivers became the Julius Berger state, with flyovers and roads that made even Abuja look hesitant. That Wike is rarely mentioned now, not because it vanished, but because time changed the narrator.
El-Rufai suffers from the same telescoping. To his admirers, he is the technocrat who remade the FCT and dragged Kaduna into a conversation about reform and infrastructure. To his critics, he is the embodiment of what political scientists call “transactional alliance politics”, a leader who forms powerful coalitions, bends institutions to his will, and then breaks with them when the alignment shifts.
It is less useful to call this betrayal than to call it pattern. From Atiku, who critics say opened the door to federal power, to Obasanjo, who in his memoir questioned El-Rufai’s loyalty as being ultimately to himself; from Yar’Adua and Jonathan, whom he opposed after serving inside the PDP establishment, to Buhari, the rare relationship that held for years; to Tinubu, with whom the bond collapsed after a stalled ministerial confirmation in 2023 and his eventual move to the SDP in 2025; and finally to Uba Sani in Kaduna, the protégé he helped install who became his adversary. Supporters will call it principle.Critics will call it calculation. What is harder to deny is the recurrence.
As Robert Jervis observed in Perception and Misperception in International Politics, leaders often believe each shift is justified by new information, while outsiders see only inconsistency. That tension has trailed El-Rufai for three decades.
Strip away party colors and region and what emerges is not two different species, but cousins in temperament. Both men represent what I would call Nigeria’s “developmental strongman” archetype: the governor who believes authority must be exercised, not merely announced. Max Weber’s classic distinction between traditional, charismatic and legal-rational authority helps here. El-Rufai and Wike leaned heavily on charismatic authority, the personal claim to decisive action, while operating inside legal-rational institutions. The result is governance by imposition.
In Kaduna, El-Rufai sacked over 22,000 teachers who failed competency tests and replaced them, restructured ministries, and ordered demolitions in the name of urban order. He threatened the Lecturers of Kaduna state university with sack. In Rivers, Wike sealed courts, suspended officials on live television, and demolished hotels during COVID-19. The message was identical even if the accents differed: I was elected to govern, not to negotiate endlessly.
Both also mastered what communication scholars call the “availability heuristic.” The more you are heard, the more you matter, but also the more chances you have to contradict yourself. El-Rufai did it with midnight tweets and policy lectures that suddenly turned defiant, as during the 2023 naira redesign crisis. Wike did it with press conferences that felt like street theater. Their language was raw by design. In political marketing, bluntness cuts through noise. A technocrat who sounds like everyone else is forgotten. A street fighter who says “I will not be intimidated” becomes the story. El-Rufai spoke like an impatient economist. Wike spoke like a man who had just left the market. Different vocabulary, same effect: controversy as oxygen.
Where the comparison becomes uncomfortable for their fans is in ambition and injury. Wike ran for president in 2022, came second to Atiku, and then believed he was entitled to the vice-presidential slot. When Okowa got it, the G5 rebellion was born. El-Rufai said in 2019 he was “too old to be a minister,” yet in 2023 he was nominated by Tinubu, screened, and then dropped. He called it political. The psychology is strikingly similar. Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance suggests that when a strong public self-image collides with rejection, the response is rarely quiet. Both men turned the wound into a narrative of betrayal by the system, which only deepened their outsider brand.
And yet, to reduce them to noise is to miss why they endured. Both understood something fundamental about Nigerian voters: we are tired of promises without pouring. Erving Goffman’s work on impression management explains it well. Politics is performance, and voters reward visible props. A road is not just asphalt. It is proof. A flyover is not just concrete. It is competence. El-Rufai gave Kaduna BRT, school feeding, and urban renewal. Wike gave Rivers 12 flyovers and called it a government of infrastructure, then took the same template to Abuja as FCT Minister, inaugurating over 50 projects by mid-2026. El-Rufai’s Abuja was about demolition and order. Wike’s Abuja is about construction and expansion. Different methods, same instinct: leave the city visibly different.
This is the paradox that makes them fascinating. The same decisiveness that breaks bureaucratic inertia can become intolerance. The same confidence that delivers projects can become arrogance. The same willingness to fight can create enemies and results in the same week. In institutional democracies, the chain is supposed to be Government → Institution → Policy → Implementation. With El-Rufai and Wike, it often became Leader → Decision → Institution → Implementation. “Kaduna government” became “El-Rufai’s Kaduna.” “Rivers government” became “Wike’s Rivers.” That personalization wins elections because voters know who to credit. It also creates a vacuum when the personality leaves.
There are differences, of course, and they matter. El-Rufai intellectualizes. He will give you a white paper before the demolition. Wike personalizes. He will show you the bulldozer first. El-Rufai’s strongmanism wears a technocratic accent. Wike’s wears a populist one. El-Rufai’s fallout with Shiites and the Muslim-Muslim ticket debate in Kaduna added a religious dimension that Wike, operating in a different demographic, did not carry in the same way. And the optics of appointing a Muslim deputy, helping to install another Muslim-muslim ticket to take over from him while seeking federal minister with his son as a federal lawmaker made El-Rufai vulnerable to charges of insensitivity that his opponents weaponized, contributing to APC’s loss in Kaduna in 2023.
But the core remains. Both men are comfortable with enemies in a way most politicians are not. For conventional politicians, controversy is a liability. For strongmen, it is fuel. Enemy, controversy, publicity, relevance, the loop feeds itself. Both also understand that in a country frustrated by abandoned projects and endless meetings, a leader who says “this road will be built whether you like me or not” will be forgiven a lot.
So the honest conclusion is not that El-Rufai and Wike are the same man. It is that they are the same political species, adapted to different terrains. They embody Nigeria’s central contradiction: we crave order and we resent the hand that imposes it. We want roads and we flinch at the tone used to build them. The force of personality that overcomes inertia can also become contempt for restraint. The confidence that produces bold projects can produce political arrogance.
Perhaps the final irony is that both men were misunderstood not only because of what they did, but because of how they said it. Political communication research consistently finds that coherence, empathy, and timing are the currency of trust. When anger replaces moderation, even truth sounds like provocation. If there is a lesson here, it is that execution without narrative is a gift left unwrapped. Nigeria will remember El-Rufai and Wike for what they built. It will also remember them for how loudly they insisted we watch.
*Bagudu Mohammed* is the founder of Alternative Perspectives, a widely read commentary platform on social media, and writes a weekly newspaper column published every Monday on the back page of People’s Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
Email: bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com | Phone: 0703 494 3575
