Growing up, there was a man in my neighborhood who was perpetually at war with someone. He believed in himself with such absolute certainty that bystanders would simply concede he was right, not out of conviction but out of exhaustion. If you clashed with him without knowing his reputation, neighbors would catch your eye and silently signal you to let it go and walk away.
That image returns every time Nyesom Wike opens another front. This time it was APC governors AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq and Hope Uzodimma, accused of plotting against him. What makes the spectacle intriguing is not just the frequency of the fights, but the choreography.
Wike becomes the loudest attacker, throwing punches with the unshakable conviction of a man incapable of error, while his opponents, mindful of decorum and the cost of a dirty brawl with a sitting minister, look timid and evasive.
The record is too consistent to be accidental. Political science calls it the succession trap. Richard Joseph’s prebendal theory and the later work of Rotimi Suberu on godfatherism describe it perfectly: a political father anoints a son, invests structure as debt, and demands perpetual loyalty as rent. The son, once he gets constitutional mandate, wants autonomy. Collision becomes inevitable.
Rivers is the laboratory: Odili to Amaechi to Wike to Fubara. Wike was once the insurgent who mastered this art. As Amaechi’s Chief of Staff from 2007 to 2011, he was the strategist. When that alliance collapsed, he used the Jonathans and his post as Minister of State for Education to wrest the PDP structure from Amaechi and win in 2015. The man who fought a godfather became one.
His own words on Fubara laid bare the theory: “Fubara’s mistake was turning against the structure that produced him.” It is social exchange theory as politics, support is not a gift, it is a loan. Fubara’s camp replied with constitutional theory that a governor owes his mandate to the people, not his predecessor. Hence the House crisis, the demolished Assembly complex, the impeachment plots.
The same pattern repeats. Atiku in 2022, after losing the primary 371 to 237, he turned loss into a war over zoning and formed the G5. The G5 had a common enemy, not a common destination, so it dissolved. FCT Senator Ireti Kingibe has experienced a prolonged feud with Wike, less about administration than about who defines relevance in Abuja. Even the November 2025 clash with naval officer A.M. Yerima over land in Gaduwa, where a minister called a junior officer enforcing orders a fool, showed what conflict scholars call personalization, institutional disagreement reframed as a test of dominance.
Now the paradox is complete. An APC minister who still claims PDP, fighting APC governors over what he calls a Rainbow Coalition for Tinubu’s 2027 re-election. The insurgent who broke Amaechi’s structure built his own, used it to make Fubara, and is now fighting to control the man he made.
The exception is that he has renewed his alignment with yesterday’s enemy, Tony Okocha, who was once firmly in Amaechi’s camp. He has also maintained a stable family life. When his wife, Justice Eberechi Suzette Wike, was asked in November 2025 what it takes to manage a strongman like her husband, she smiled and simply said, “It takes a strong woman to do so.”
Perhaps Wike does not fight everyone. He simply embodies the cycle he once fought. And that is why, even as one fight ends, all of Nigeria asks: who is next?
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 Peoples Daily.Web: https://alternativeperspective.onrender.com
bagudumohammed15197@gmail.com
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