Time To Rein-in Nyesom Wike

Tunde Asaju is my name, and I penned this piece in the name of those who are struggling to come to terms with the shock and outrage of Wike’s naked dance in Abuja.

BY TUNDE ASAJU

Nigeria is a democracy – that is not a statement of fact, it’s a wish. The selection process by the parties are flawed but if it suits the civilian fraudsters and their lackeys, they’ll overlook it. The elections are rigged, but the Nigerian will excuse it as a learning process. Then of course in 2023 when nations seek for leaders with ideas that reveal the national democratic aspirations of the majority, we, Nigerians make choices based on the ethnic coloration of the actors and of course, more principally their professed religious inclinations.

With such parameters, when we come with someone like Jagaban as president, we are happy. In the Western area where he comes from, nothing should stop the emergence of one of their ‘illustrious sons’ from taking the ‘throne’, not even a Muslim-Muslim ticket for a people who are said to be religiously diverse and faithfully tolerant. Not his shady past, his dodgy educational qualifications or his not too sterling ‘professional accomplishments’. So we have him as President. Hurray!

And for ministerial appointments, Bola Ahmed Tinubu shows (with his nominations and the timing), he was not expecting to ‘win’. If he was, he’d be prepared. He is NOT. So what does the BAT do? He went to the market, chose some lackeys and picked a few area boys.

One of them is Nyesom Ezenwo Wike. Trained as a lawyer, a former minister and a recently retired Governor of the oil-rich Rivers State. Wike, the man is a practical demonstration of the fact that not all educational institutions are like my Alma mater, Unilorin. At Unilorin, while I schooled there, they don’t award degrees except the recipients prove their worth in ‘character and learning’. Wike might be worthy of learning, but in character in a democracy he is only fit for the motorpark. He conducts himself not as a gentleman, but as a thug.

As Governor of Rivers State, he was a performer who build structures. Good thing. But when it comes to addressing humans, the people that elected him, he approached his duty like a thuggish circus clown. He goes about with a band of musicians to sing his praise, does not know what nobility is and is antithetical to decorous behaviour. Here was a Governor who addressed a crown head with insults because he could. Here was a ‘democrat’ who is unamenable to party discipline. Here is the kind of man you do not wish to meet first thing in the morning simply because the answer to a common greeting of ‘good morning’ could send you to suicide.

Sadly, Tinubu needs people like Wike. Tinubu chose a man like Wike as a ministerial nominee. The Senate of bow-and-go approved his nomination without qualms. Now Tinubu has made him the official Mayor of Nigeria’s Capital city, Abuja.

Abuja, like the capital of good countries ought to be governed, not ruled. It is the capital city of Africa’s most populous nation, the famed giant in limbo. It needs a cool head, someone worthy in vision, character and compartment – all of which Wike apparently lacks.

Before he had read a handover note or been introduced to his staff, he started with threats like a precolonial headmaster. That he promised to restore the distorted masterplan is not in itself a bad thing, it’s the language he used that depicts him as unfit for the office of a democratic leader or society. He will bring houses down, with obvious scant respect for the rights of its builders or how that impacts a sprawling city with housing challenges.

A day after, Vanguard quotes him as telling his staff that he will increase their blood pressure. Such words traumatize you even as a citizen 15,000 air miles away. No true leader threatens to send his staff to the emergency room. That is not the speech of democracy. It is speech suited to the halcyon days of dictators, where soldiers traumatized the citizens by entering classrooms through open windows and making late civil servants kneel down while being photographed and videoed without respect for their dignity as humans or their rights as citizens of a modern nation.

But Wike has his followers and the approval of the man who appointed him. When it suits Tinubu, he has been known to threaten to withdraw civility from people that patronize him. He had referred to a Governor he reportedly helped to ‘win’ elections as ‘eléyìí’ – this one in an open forum. He openly confessed to having made his predecessor president and swore that he wouldn’t have done it without his (Tinubu’s) immense power.

His wife had openly castigated a whole region of Nigeria as people that cannot be trusted. None of these conducts prevented his emergence as leader of his party. All these undemocratic and unconscionable behaviours were excused because we, as a people have no sense of democratic decorum or the approved rules of civilized conduct. We are a nation of ‘anything goes’, our leaders or rulers treat us as such and we are cheerleaders who egg them on. When we condone this assault on our psyche at home, we lose the right to complain of mal or mistreatment anywhere else.

How could we, as citizens of a country that assaults and insults us lead a continent that fought against apartheid? How could we as citizens so shabily treated, want to lead an onslaught against those that assault democracy in Niger or elsewhere?

How would we in good conscience ask our friends, investors or tourists to come to a capital ruled by a man of caustic and uncouth tongue? How do we expect to develop when our elected leaders and their selected people servants treat us worse in 2023 than Lugard’s overlords did in 1950? How?

This is not a tirade even if it reads like one, rather, it is a call for reasoning. Tinubu’s friends in the media, social and mainstream credit him as a listening leader, somebody should tell him to put a lease on his dog. He should call Wike in and lecture him on the principles and conduct expected of the people’s servant. We, the citizens Of Nigeria as NOT Wike’s pre-colonial students. He cannot Lord it over us. If he has not learnt by now that he is not better than the least person in the FCT in the service of Abuja and Nigeria, then he is NOT qualified to be a minister of a federal Republic.

The earlier someone sends Wike to his shrink, the better for the image of Nigeria and its pseudo-democracy. He needs to learn the rules of civilized conduct as his mannerless conduct reflects on all Nigerians home and in the diaspora.

Mo wí tèmi!

Tunde Asaju is my name, and I penned this piece in the name of those who are struggling to come to terms with the shock and outrage of Wike’s naked dance in Abuja.