I have come to believe that every man has his season. There is a season to stand tall, and a season to kneel. That is why wisdom has always counseled moderation, humility, and the quiet art of reading the room. Empathy is not weakness. Emotional intelligence is not cowardice. Yet I also know how hard this is when interests clash, when ideas become battle lines, when politics turns survival into a reflex. In those moments, we are tempted to trade grace for grit, and grit for a blade.
Disagreement is inevitable. But when disagreement curdles into rivalry, we stop seeing people and start seeing enemies. Each side hunts for a fault, a slip, a headline to use as a punch. The goal is no longer persuasion. It is suppression. And in that fever, something ugly grows: the “us versus them” syndrome that kills balance, drains objectivity, and replaces love with a bitter wish to see the other fall. People begin to pray for downfall as if it were justice. They wait for the day the strong man stumbles, so they can clap and say, “See? God has caught you. We told you it would never end well.”
That is what flashed through my mind when news broke that a woman had been found dead in the residence of the Minister of Works, Senator David Umahi, one of the most unapologetic marketers of the Tinubu presidency. Before the police could even finish their first statement, the story ran like fire. Photos of the late Mary Habila circulated. Conclusions were drawn instantly. “Come and see your Umahi,” the whispers went. “The one who mocked us, who looked down on us.” Because of who he is, because of how he speaks, the public did not wait for facts. The police were forced to announce a full investigation simply because the interest was too loud to ignore.
There is a Nupe saying that cuts close here: if you do not want to be dragged, do not fall to the ground. A man standing upright is hard to pull. A man on the ground is easy. And for years, Umahi stood upright with a kind of political swagger that did not court sympathy. He spoke with brute defiance, with the symbolism of a man who would not bend to anti-government sentiment even in his own region. So when he suddenly became the one being dragged, many people did not rush to cover him. They shook their heads, not in anger, but in that cold pity reserved for those who never learned to soften their voice.
This is not only about one incident. It is about how power sounds when it forgets the weight of other people’s pain. For the last two years, Umahi and Peter Obi have been locked in a war of words that tells you everything about how Nigerian politics eats its own. It began in May 2024, when Obi called the Tinubu administration’s new mega-highways “landscape decoration escapades” and asked that existing roads be fixed first. Umahi kept that post like a receipt, and used it again and again as proof that Obi was against legacy projects.
By October 13, 2025, the fight widened. Umahi said it was not yet the South-East’s turn for the presidency and that Tinubu should finish two terms. Obi’s aide, Yunusa Tanko, replied that no individual could choose the next president, only voters could. Then 2026 came, and the temperature rose. On June 19, 2026, inspecting Section 2 of the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Superhighway in Epe, Umahi accused Obi of chasing the presidency “at all costs” and of not being forthright about the South-East. He dragged old ghosts into the room too, IPOB, Nnamdi Kanu, and alleged that Obi had done demolitions as Anambra governor without compensation. Obi answered the next day on X, without naming Umahi, calling the claims baseless distractions and saying his government preferred repair to disruption.
In July 2026 the exchanges turned personal. In Ebonyi, Umahi dismissed talk of threats to Obi’s life as frustration, saying nobody wanted Obi dead because the APC wanted him alive to “watch himself lose again” in 2027. He warned he would keep responding if Obi kept attacking Tinubu, and offered a public debate on the administration’s achievements. That same month, when Obi posted pictures of bad portions of the Asaba-Benin Expressway, Umahi said reconstruction had started in March 2025 and called the photos politically motivated comedy. Again he threw down a debate challenge on costs and standards.
Again in July 2026, on Arise TV, Umahi went further. He dismissed the idea that the APC feared Obi, called the buzz around him “AI politics,” and said neither he nor Tinubu saw Obi as a threat. He questioned Obi’s record in Anambra, roads, industry, airport, seaport, contractors’ payments, and lawsuits against critics. “Obi cannot even face me,” he said, “let alone the president.”
Through it all, Umahi framed himself as the defender of Tinubu’s infrastructure agenda, especially the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway. He argued the South-East was shifting to Tinubu because of visible projects, and he contrasted Obi’s Anambra with Tinubu’s Lagos. Obi, for his part, stayed mostly on X and through aides, denying the demolition claims, defending maintenance-first policy, and insisting elections belong to the people, not to elites. As 2027 draws near, the fight has become louder, sharper, and more personal.
This is what I mean by exaggerated laughter. It is the sound a public makes when a man who spoke with little mercy finds himself in a place that requires mercy. It is not justice. It is not always fair. But it is human.
Umahi is not the first. Reno Omokri walked a similar road. Once a critic of Tinubu, he became one of the president’s most visible, most combative defenders. When his name appeared on the ambassadorial list, the backlash was instant. Petitions, discontent, noise in the National Assembly. People laughed. They made memes. “How market, Reno?” someone wrote, promising to follow him to any country he was posted just to protest. Eventually he was cleared, but the scar of public mockery stayed.
Nasir El-Rufai knows this too. His rejection as a ministerial nominee was celebrated by many who remembered his bluntness, his defense of the Muslim-Muslim ticket, his push for subsidy removal under Buhari. Shehu Sani recently wrote bitterly about how El-Rufai used power without restraint, and how that history now echoes back. Even when El-Rufai later faced accusations that had little to do with him personally, many sided with the accusers not because the accuser was perfect, but because the mood had changed.
That is the paradox of public life. We do not always judge on evidence alone. We judge on memory. On tone. On whether you laughed too loudly when others were hurting.
Scholars have tried to explain this. Max Weber warned about the ethic of responsibility in politics, the need to weigh consequences, not just convictions. Aristotle called it ethos, the credibility you build by how you treat people when you do not need them. Modern research on political communication shows that audiences remember emotional tone more than policy detail. When a leader is perceived as callous, the public withholds sympathy even in moments of vulnerability. This is not noble. But it is predictable.
Even within government, the same dynamic plays out. In May 2026, President Tinubu created a new Office of Special Adviser on Homeland Security and appointed retired Major General Adeyinka Famadewa. Critics immediately called it a duplication of the NSA, Nuhu Ribadu’s office. The ADC said if the president had lost confidence in Ribadu, he should replace him, not create a parallel title. Others saw it as a sign Ribadu was being edged out. The Presidency insisted it was about coordination, not demotion. Yet online, many who disliked the government celebrated it as Ribadu’s “fall.” His crime? Serving in an administration they had already decided to hate.
We cannot control what people feel about us. But we can choose how we speak while we are strong. Because strength is rented. It expires.
The truth is, no society can run without conflict, and no politics can survive without disagreement. But there is a difference between contest and cruelty. Between defending an idea and delighting in another’s pain. When we turn every opponent into an enemy, we train the public to clap at our funeral.
So yes, I feel pity for Umahi in this moment. Not because the questions around Mary Habila’s death should be silenced. They must be answered fully, transparently, and without fear. But because I see a man who built a brand on hardness now discovering how lonely hardness can be when the ground shifts.
The laughter will not last. It never does. One day the crowd that claps will be quiet, and another crowd will be laughing at someone else. That is the cycle. The only way to break it is to speak in a way that leaves room for your own vulnerability tomorrow. To remember that every consumer is also a citizen, every critic is also a neighbor, and every “bully” is also a man who will one day need the grace he did not give.
In the end, the question is not who is falling. The question is who will still have people willing to help them stand up when they do.
