Game theorists warn that when two hawks meet, the expected payoff for each becomes negative: C > V > 0. Yet, it is the man who is afraid to join a fight who says: ‘I was not born into this household.’ The ?dán tree at the doorstep never fights the homeboy’s battles.
And when a proverb strikes close to home, only a weakling lets it pass unanswered.
The game and the proverbs are for those blaming FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike for answering the APC governors fire for fire last week.
Speaking on Channels Television, an APC leader from Jigawa, Hon. Farouq Aliyu, wondered why Wike chose to fight governors who had not mentioned his name in their rejection of political alliances. Aliyu made it clear that his party was not ready to swallow the poison Wike had helped it feed the PDP.
Like a harvester of heads who cannot bear the sight of a sword, Aliyu said: ‘We appreciate what he (Wike) did for us, and anybody that is willing to destroy his party for us, we welcome him, like Wike tried to destroy his party. Now, we will not allow him to also use our party, the APC, to build his own party, the PDP. He cannot come through the back door in the name of support for President Tinubu.’
Last week, I discussed Nasir El-Rufai and the hubris that hanged his freedom. Today, it is Nyesom Wike, the man some of our local Salman Rushdies have christened Nigeria’s ‘peer president’.
In their battles and rhetoric of war, Wike and El Rufai are political twins. One is the highly calculating, intellectualised political archetype of the North; the other is the street-savvy, fiercely combative Emperor Shaka of the South. Check their operational DNA, their thirst for control, their no-prisoner methodology, and their no-nonsense communication. How else do two sides of the same political coin look like?
Listen to Shaka, the Zulu king, in Ernest Ritter’s 1955 biography, ‘Shaka Zulu’: ‘Strike an enemy once and for all. Let him cease to exist as a tribe or he will live to fly in your throat again.’ Does that not sound like the creed of our political twins?
For a clearer picture of what I mean, look through the lens of Francesca Haig’s dystopian novel, ‘The Fire Sermon’. In its post-apocalyptic world, every human is born a twin: one an Alpha, the other an Omega; different in form and fortune but inescapably bound together. Wike and El-Rufai may inhabit opposite ends of Nigeria’s political geography, but they are products of the same furnace of power.
Both are short of stature; neither is ever short of wars. They reincarnate Òjó Aburúmákú, the 11th Ààr? ?`nà Kakanfò, who stirred up a rebellion against himself when he could find no war to fight, then violently crushed it. His name, Òjó Aburúmákú, means, literally, ‘the terrible one who will not die.’
Wike, a survivalist tenant in the APC’s house of power, is currently confronting a constellation of APC forces supposedly ‘jealous’ of his Rainbow Coalition in Rivers, in Kwara, Imo, Gombe and elsewhere.
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare asks: ‘What is in a name?’ Sometimes, a great deal: history, prophecy and warning. Nyesom Wike’s choice of ‘Rainbow’ as adjective for his coalition contraption carries all three. On July 10, 1985, French secret agents sank Greenpeace’s flagship, Rainbow Warrior, as it prepared to lead protests against France’s nuclear tests in the Pacific. Wike’s Rainbow Coalition is now sailing through similarly hostile political waters, with APC governors determined to stop it before it reaches the electoral battlefield.
‘The APC Governors Forum unanimously resolved that its members would not participate in, support or endorse any alliance or political arrangement capable of undermining the re-election of Mr President, weakening the APC or adversely affecting any candidate of the party at all levels. In other words, the forum has no intention to support any candidate at any level that is not an APC candidate because our candidates who are contesting the election are being sponsored by our party. The governors’ campaign commitment is exclusively to all APC candidates.’ That was from APC governors as they attacked Wike’s Rainbow Coalition on Monday, 14 September, 2026.
The statement was the first shot, unprovoked. Was it not Isaac Newton who taught that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction? Wike is one General who never receives fire without returning it. Freeborns do not hire others to rinse their mouths for them; they speak for themselves. Wike did on Tuesday, 15 September, 2026:
‘They are politically lazy. When you have your local problems, don’t use Mr President as your excuse… The governor of Kwara, so unfortunate-anytime he sees a snake, it is Wike. Anytime he sees a reptile, it is Wike. Any day he doesn’t eat, it is Wike. I have never seen people devote more time to gossip than to the work they have been given. He has three serving senators; he changed all of them. He has House of Representatives members; he changed all of them… When I start… I have been on my own. They are looking for trouble where there is no trouble…’
Who else would talk that tough and tall in this democracy but Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, our presidential power-sharer?
I think Wike was right in his choice of words. His snake metaphor was apt; the warning about some people looking for trouble was equally spot-on. The APC governors are indeed inhaling trouble. But it may already be too late for us to warn them: trouble is under their roof.
In ‘The Farmer and the Viper’, Aesop tells the story of a farmer who found a snake frozen, stiff and almost dead from the winter cold. Moved by pity, the farmer picked it up, tucked it inside his coat and carried it home. Warmed by the farmer’s body, the snake came back to life. The moment it recovered its strength, it sank its fangs into the breast that had saved it.
As the poison spread through him, the dying farmer said: ‘I have only myself to blame. I knew it was a snake when I picked it up.’
That is the APC’s story with Nyesom Wike. The slave-catching party brought him into its warm house because it needed his sulphuric acid to dissolve the PDP’s flesh and bone. Now warm, secure and powerful, Wike has announced that his loyalty is to Bola Tinubu, not to the APC, its governors or its candidates. The governors are unhappy. They may protest, but the snake has committed no offence against its nature. It has merely done what snakes do.
Beyond Aesop and his ancient tales, I consulted the sages who preserved the lessons of the classics. Unto them I poured a libation of ìbà (homage and reverence) while scooping from their well stories that illuminate APC’s many-coloured fight.
In Epistles I.10, the Roman poet, Horace, warns that you may drive nature out with a pitchfork, but it will always return (Naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret). The APC apparently thought appointment and presidential favour would make Wike forget the instincts that made him Wike. But office does not alter nature; it merely gives nature a larger room in which to operate.
In Book II of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ is the story of Troy and the Trojans: the treachery of Sinon, the fatal deception of the wooden horse and the tragic fall of King Priam. This is not quite a story about the persistence of nature; it is about the folly of carrying into one’s fortress the instrument of one’s own ruin. The APC governors are beginning to know that what they welcomed as Tinubu’s electoral gift may be their Trojan Horse. Wike entered the fortress bearing votes for the president; they now fear that he also carried within him candidates and coalitions capable of opening the shut gates of power to the opposition.
In Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, we read of King Lycaon’s depravity, the thunderbolt that destroyed his palace and his transformation into a wolf. Lycaon did not become savage because he became a wolf; he became a wolf because savagery was already in his nature. In the same manner, Wike did not acquire his combative instincts upon entering the APC government; the APC merely dipped the man’s arrowheads in poison. Indeed, the party recruited Wike precisely because it had seen what his bite did to the PDP. It is therefore strange that APC governors are now crying blue murder at the sight of their valued scorpion’s raised tail.
The original Rainbow Warrior was attacked from outside by the French. The captain of Nigeria’s political rainbow, however, is lodged deep inside a government and a party which seek to sink his vessel. In this battle, the APC is both the anchoring harbour and the hostile navy; it shelters Wike in Abuja while firing at his multicoloured ensign from the states.
Around me is a congregation of football devotees. So, I asked them if football offered its own picture of this strange arrangement. They chorused yes. Wike is a PDP player who loaned himself to Tinubu’s team. He helped the president win the last championship and was rewarded with a commanding place in the starting eleven. But the APC governors have now discovered that wearing the government’s jersey is not the same as belonging to their club. Wike insists that his loyalty is to the man who signed and fields him, not to the club and the other players in the dressing room. The greater provocation is that with the next championship on the horizon, he is now seen tackling APC players while creating scoring chances for candidates in rival jerseys. In regulated football, such a player would be accused of divided loyalty; in Nigerian politics, the referee simply waves play on.
My football fanatics pointed at José Mourinho’s first spell at Real Madrid. Hired by club president, Florentino Pérez, Mourinho enjoyed the confidence of the man who brought him in but became embroiled in conflicts with powerful figures in the dressing room. He fought Cristiano Ronaldo, battled Sergio Ramos and benched the legendary goalkeeper, Iker Casillas. The resulting struggle was a ‘nightmare’ which divided the club despite Mourinho’s success on the pitch. Historians of that period say by the time Mourinho left the club in 2013, the dressing room was completely fractured, with reports that senior players had given their president an ultimatum: ‘It’s him or us.’
It is strong, particularly the ‘rainbow warrior’ callback. I would tighten it slightly:
APC governors may soon give Tinubu the same ultimatum: ‘Choose between us and your Rainbow Warrior.’
It is a Hawk-Dove situation. If they fight dirty, the cost of the conflict may exceed the value of the resource they are contesting. Game Theory expresses it neatly: C > V > 0, where V is the value of the contested resource and C is the severe cost of an escalated mutual conflict. The theorists warn that when two hawks meet, the expected payoff for each becomes negative. Even animals appear to recognise this ruinous outcome; hence, they have evolved mixed Hawk and Dove strategies which keep conflicts from becoming fatal. But animals may be wiser than politicians-especially where power and money are involved.
So, for Tinubu, his Wike, and his APC, we will be happy to witness the choice they make and the consequences.
Whatever the choice, one thing appears certain: there will be a price to pay for all the dirty bombs being detonated in this war. France ultimately paid dearly for sinking the first Rainbow Warrior. Those firing at Wike’s Rainbow Coalition will discover that political torpedoes also come at a price. I have my popcorn ready. Elections are coming; at the state level, both sides will play rough-and both will pay dearly. I swear!