Wike Again?

Muiz Banire By Guest columnist

The recent statement credited to the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, and issued through his spokesman, Lere Olayinka, was read in many quarters with no small amusement. In it, the Minister sought, once again, to clarify a position he has now restated several times in recent weeks that his support ahead of the 2027 general elections is for President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s re-election, and for President Tinubu alone,  not for the All Progressives Congress (APC) as a political party including the structures at the state levels, and certainly not for its governors, several of whom he has lately been at loggerheads with, most prominently Governor AbdulRahman AbdulRazaq of Kwara State, chairman of the Governors forum and Governor Hope Uzodinma of Imo State, who doubles as chairman of the Progressive Governors Forum.

What exactly lies at the root of that acrimony,  whether it is a contest over control of political structures, resentment at being reminded that he is, on paper, still a member of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), or something more personal,  does not detain me in this piece. What does detain me is the implication of the Minister’s stated position, both for the APC as a governing party and for President Tinubu himself, even after he has been successfully returned to office. For the avoidance of doubt, it is worth restating what the Minister actually said. Through his spokesman, Wike insisted that he never promised anyone that the PDP would not field candidates for governorship, National Assembly, or State Houses of Assembly seats in 2027.

He described the so-called “Rainbow Coalition”, the loose platform he has been assembling in states such as Kwara, Gombe, Rivers, and elsewhere,  as having “nothing to do with the APC,” but rather as a gathering of individuals across party lines who are satisfied with the President’s performance and are willing to mobilise support for his second term.

“What I said, and what I stand by, is that I will mobilise support for the re-election of the President,” he said. “I won’t be the one to help people win elections in their states. Politics is local, and those having problems in their states should resolve them instead of using the re-election of the President to whip up sentiments.”

This was, in essence, Wike’s reply to the Progressive Governors Forum, which had, days earlier, resolved that no member of the forum would participate in any political alliance capable of “undermining the re-election of Mr President, weakening the APC, or adversely affecting any candidate of the party at all levels.”

The governors, reading the tea leaves correctly, understood the Rainbow Coalition for what it plainly threatens to become: a vehicle for unseating APC governors and legislators under the cover of supporting the man at the top of the ticket. It is worth recalling, too, that this is not a new territory for the Minister. He rose to national prominence in this dispensation as one of the five PDP governors,  the so-called G5,  who broke ranks with their own party’s presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, in 2023 and threw their weight behind Tinubu’s candidature, without, as Wike is fond of pointing out, ever formally decamping to the APC or negotiating terms with the party’s leadership.

That history is precisely why his present posture is worth interrogating: it is not a one-off slip of the tongue but a considered, repeated, and increasingly consequential political doctrine. Stripped of its diplomatic phrasing, what the Minister is impliedly saying is that he does not subscribe to the ideology of the APC as a political party. The import of this, quite logically, is that he does not subscribe to the President’s programmes and policies either, since those programmes were not conjured by Bola Tinubu, the private citizen; they were conceived, articulated, and are being executed on the platform, and in the name, of the APC. A President does not govern in a vacuum. He governs through a party structure,  its senators, its members of the House of Representatives, its governors, its state legislators,  all of whom are, at least nominally, bound to a shared manifesto and a shared programme of government.

This is not merely a debating point; it is a settled Nigerian constitutional and electoral law. The apex court has, in a line of authorities, beginning most prominently with Amaechi v INEC, held consistently that it is political parties, and not individual candidates, that contest and win elections in Nigeria. A candidate, in the Supreme Court’s own reasoning, is merely the party’s nominee on the ballot; sovereignty over the mandate resides with the party that sponsors him. The same philosophy animates Sections 68(1)(g) and 109(1)(g) of the 1999 Constitution, which strip a legislator of his seat should he defect from the party that sponsored his election to another party, save in the narrow case of a genuine division or merger within his own party.

The entire architecture of our electoral law, in other words, is built around the party as the primary unit of political accountability,  not the individual, however popular or well-intentioned. To support a President personally while publicly disclaiming the party that sponsors him is, therefore, to stand this settled logic on its head. It is a distinction the law itself does not recognise, and one the practical business of governance cannot sustain either.

Certainly, it is a distinction without a difference. Taken to its natural conclusion, the Minister’s position would mean that his own party, the PDP, remains fully at liberty to sponsor candidates against APC candidates in every state of the federation, for Senate, for the House of Representatives, for State Houses of Assembly, even for governorship, even as he professes unwavering fidelity to the man at the top of the APC’s presidential ticket. This is, without exaggeration, having one’s cake and eating it. The Minister is being clever by half. By the APC constitution, the President is the leader of the party and must at all times be seen to be actively protecting and supporting the interests of his members.  Consider the practical implications.

If APC Senators and members of the House of Representatives are not returned to the National Assembly in sufficient numbers, will the President, whom Wike claims to support singularly and unconditionally, enjoy a smooth ride in passing his budgets, his appropriation bills, his tax and fiscal reform legislation, or in securing confirmation for his nominees? Ditto for the governors: if the majority of the thirty-six states are not led by governors who share the President’s party affiliation and, by extension, his policy commitments, will Mr President find it easy to drive nationwide implementation of federal programmes that require state-level cooperation, from infrastructure financing to security architecture to the rollout of social intervention schemes?

Governance in a federation such as ours is a joint enterprise between the centre and the federating units, and that joint enterprise is, for better or worse, organised along party lines. A President stripped of a working legislative majority and a friendly cohort of governors is a President whose second term will be spent negotiating rather than delivering. All of this exposes the somewhat myopic nature of the Minister’s reasoning,  as though the President’s success at the polls in 2027 were the end of the story, rather than merely its opening chapter.

The arithmetic simply does not add up. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume without conceding that the Minister genuinely believes in his own party, the PDP, and owes no ideological allegiance whatsoever to the APC. If that were truly so, one is entitled to ask why he fought so hard, and so publicly, to deny Governor Siminalayi Fubara,  his own political protégé, whom he had personally midwifed into office in 2023, a return ticket for a second term, and did so squarely within the APC, the very party he now says means nothing to him. The background bears brief recollection. Fubara, having succeeded Wike as Governor of Rivers State, soon fell out spectacularly with his benefactor, in a crisis that convulsed the State’s House of Assembly, produced rival factions among the State’s lawmakers, and ultimately compelled President Tinubu to declare a six-month state of emergency in Rivers State in March 2025, suspending both the governor and the legislature.

Upon his reinstatement, Fubara defected from the PDP to the APC, presenting the move as a gesture of gratitude to the President for his intervention. Yet, when the time came for Fubara to seek the APC’s ticket for a second term, it was Wike, again, who worked assiduously behind the scenes, and at times quite openly, clashing publicly with the APC’s National Secretary, Ajibola Basiru, over the matter, to ensure that his estranged protégé did not secure it. Fubara eventually withdrew from the APC governorship primary in May 2026 for obvious reasons to the political class and the initiated members of the public. If a man who claims no stake in the APC’s internal affairs can nonetheless determine who does, and does not, carry that party’s flag in a matter as consequential as a sitting governor’s re-election bid, then his professed indifference to the party’s ideology rings rather hollow.

That is approbation and reprobation in its plainest form, blowing hot and cold as convenience dictates. As the Yoruba elders would put it: ti o ba maa je osokolo, ki o je osokolo, ti  o ba ma je osakala, ki o je osakala, osokolo, osakala ko ye omoluabi, loosely rendered, if one insists on playing both sides of a matter, one ought, at the very least, to be consistent about which side one is playing; but, in truth, that kind of double game does not become a person of honour and substance. It is not, to put it mildly, noble.

There is, finally, a question of resources and patronage that I will put as mildly as I can, if only to avoid spilling the milk unnecessarily. The goodwill that the Minister and his allies, scattered across various federal offices, currently deploy to service, sustain, and expand political structures in the States, including, one might add, in Rivers State itself, did not fall from the sky, nor was it conjured from the PDP’s own increasingly threadbare coffers. It flows, in no small measure, from the platform, the appointments, and the patronage networks of the very APC-led federal government the Minister insists he owes no allegiance to. One is entitled to ask: where else is the origin and source of that goodwill, if not from the party currently in power at the centre?

These are realities that are obvious to anyone paying even modest attention to the workings of Nigerian political patronage. Nigerian voting behaviour has never been rigidly party-disciplined across all levels of an election held on the same day, and a coalition organised around the appeal of a single candidate, rather than strict party loyalty, is not in itself a novel or illegitimate political strategy,  coalitions of convenience are, after all, a recurring feature of Nigerian politics, the Minister’s own political career being a rather vivid illustration of the point. Whether that observed pattern of split-ticket voting can bear the considerably heavier weight the Minister now places on it, sufficient to detach a sitting President from the party structure that sponsors, funds, and legislates for him, is, however, an altogether different question, and this piece has tried, as best it can, to answer that question in the negative.

The danger looms if the theory is sustainable. The Minister’s insistence that his loyalty begins and ends with the person of the President, and not with the party that placed him there, may serve his immediate political convenience, allowing him to build a personal coalition unencumbered by party discipline, while retaining a foothold, and considerable leverage, within the very party whose structures he claims not to need. But it is, on close inspection, a position built on sand. Nigerian electoral law recognises parties, not personalities, as the primary vehicles of political contest.

Nigerian governance, as a practical matter, requires a working coalition of legislators and governors bound by more than personal affection for the man at the top. And Minister Wike’s own conduct in Rivers State, his readiness to determine who does and does not carry the APC’s flag in a race he claims does not concern him, suggests that even he does not, in practice, believe his own theory.

In fact, if his postulation is correct, he should have sponsored his candidate under PDP and still worked for the President in Rivers State. He must appreciate the fact that it is not at all times that the formulae of political segregation work, particularly where the level of literacy is low. The consequence is that the political interest of the president he purports to be serving and protecting becomes endangered. This could end up being a situation of kobo-wise, pound-foolish. 

As the APC governors and the Presidency navigate the delicate business of managing an ambitious, resourceful, and occasionally unpredictable ally in the run-up to 2027, they would do well to remember that political ycoalitions built on the shifting sands of personal loyalty, rather than the firmer ground of shared party structure and discipline, have a well-documented history of coming apart at precisely the moment they are needed most.

•Dr Banire, a lawyer, politician and public commentator, is Senior Advocate of Nigeria.