The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) has finally expelled the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, former Ekiti State governor, Ayodele Fayose and the party’s former National Secretary, Samuel Anyanwu.
Their expulsion was announced during the ongoing PDP convention at the Lekan Salami Stadium, Adamasingba, Ibadan, Oyo State capital. Former National Vice Chairman of the PDP (South), Olabode George, moved the motion for the immediate expulsion of the three high-profile members. George, one of the party’s oldest power brokers, insisted that the party must restore discipline and unity in its ranks. The motion was promptly seconded by the Chairman of the PDP in Bauchi State, Samaila Buga, and the convention promptly adopted the motion.
Top commander of the Ansaru terrorist group in Nigeria, Abdulazeez Obadaki, alias Bomboy, has been captured by the Department of State Services (DSS) three years after he escaped from detention. Obadaki is believed to be the mastermind of the August 7, 2012 attack on a Deeper Life Bible Church near Okene, Kogi State. The attack carried out by three gunmen armed with AK-47 rifles during a night worship service, left at least 19 worshippers, including the presiding pastor dead, with many others severely injured. The attack drew nationwide outrage and was widely condemned as one of the most heinous acts of terror in the region. Security sources confirmed that Obadaki not only coordinated the 2012 church massacre but also played a central role in the February 2022 coordinated bank robberies in Uromi, Edo State. The robberies claimed the lives of several police officers and civilians and resulted in the theft of hundreds of millions of naira. Obadaki was earlier captured by the security operatives but escaped from lawful custody during the July 2022 attack on the Kuje Custodial Centre. He is now said to have confessed to masterminding the jailbreak after his transfer from the Kabba Custodial Centre in June 2022. After more than three years on the run, DSS operatives tracked and recaptured the fugitive early morning yesterday, December 14, in what officials described as a “meticulously coordinated, intelligence-led operation.” His re-arrest came two months after the Service arraigned five suspects implicated in the 2022 attack on St. Francis Catholic Church, Owo, Ondo State.
The Federal Government of Nigeria has scrapped the national policy mandating the use of indigenous languages as the medium of instruction in Nigerian schools. The Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, who made this known at the 2025 Language in Education International Conference, organised by the British Council in Abuja, said that the cancellation was approved at the 69th meeting of the National Council on Education, held in Akure, Ondo State, from November 3 to 7. The policy, approved in 2022 as the National Language Policy, stipulated that children from Early Childhood Education to Primary Six should be taught in their mother tongue or the language of the immediate community. But the minister regretted: “We have seen a mass failure rate in WAEC, NECO, and JAMB in certain geo-political zones of the country, and those are the ones that adopted the mother tongue in an oversubscribed manner. “This is about evidence-based governance. English now stands as the medium of instruction from pre-primary, primary, junior secondary, senior secondary, and tertiary education. “Using the mother tongue language in Nigeria for the past 15 years has literally destroyed education in certain regions. We have to talk about evidence, not emotions.” Over the years, there have been calls for Nigeria to adopt the use of indigenous languages as a method of teaching in schools, claiming it will make students understand better. In countries like China and Russia, indigenous languages are often used to teach students.
Governor Ademola Adeleke has presented a 2026 Osun State budget of the sum of ₦705 Billion to the state House of Assembly for consideration and approval. The budget, tagged: “budget of economic transformation,” has 55 percent as capital expenditure and 45 percent as recurrent expenditure. The Governor confirmed that his government has attained a remarkable milestone in the implementation of the 2025 Budget, and that the 2026 budget is built on the achievements of the last three years of his being in charge. Giving a breakdown of the budget, Adeleke said that the total revenue is made up of Recurrent Revenue, where Government Share of FAAC is ₦221,680,000,000 and Independent Revenue is ( ₦199,573,229,320. “Th other receipts are Two Hundred and Sixty-Eight Billion, Three Hundred and Forty-Eight Million, Five Hundred and Eighteen Thousand, Eight Hundred and Sixty Naira (₦268,348,518,860.00). “The Expenditure comprises of Recurrent Expenditure of Three Hundred and Seventeen Billion, Four Hundred and Fourteen Million, Three Hundred and Fifty-Three Thousand, Three Hundred and Fifty Naira (₦317,414,353,350.00), which is 45% of the total budget. “Recurrent Expenditure is divided into Personnel Cost of ₦135,005,722,430.00. and Overhead Cost of ₦182,408,630,920.00 made up of Salaries and Allowances as well as Pensions and Gratuities. The Capital Expenditure has the total sum of ₦388,379,695,320.00, which is 55% of the total budget. “The 2026 Budget Proposal is prepared on the projection of the 2026 – 2028 Medium – Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF) as required by the Osun State Fiscal Responsibility Law 2012.” The governor recalled that the State Infrastructure development of the state which has been on the decline before the inception of his Administration has changed for the better since he came on board, reinstating his commitment to development in every nook and cranny of the State. “With the Construction of over 300Km length of roads spread across the three senatorial districts, flyovers constructed to enhance smooth movement of vehicles and decongestion of bottleneck road junctions. By the grace of God, we have delivered over 75% of the road infrastructure embarked upon by this administration and we will not leave any project uncompleted. “It must be stated that our administration will continue to ensure prompt payment of full salaries and pensions to Osun workers and pensioners which we have been committed to since assuming office in the year 2022. “We had embarked on Imole Medical and surgical outreach to provide succor for people in the six (6) Federal Constituencies across the State between January and February this year, 2025, this is a continuation of what we started from December 2024. “We inaugurated Ten Thousand (10,000) Youth into Imole Youth Corps Scheme, to reduce the menace of unemployment, poverty and youth restiveness. The beneficiaries have since been deployed to various sectors such as Imole Environmental Corp, Imole Teachers Corps and Imole Medical Corps. “On our Secondary Health Care facilities, I am delighted to tell this Honourable House that Mrs Folorunso Alakija has handed over the Medical Research and Training Hospital, which she built, to Osun State. I want to sincerely appreciate the family for this good gesture. Moreover, the UNIOSUN Teaching Hospital has witnessed infrastructural renewal, digital innovation, and genuine commitment to staff welfare and patient care.” Earlier, the House Speaker, Adewale Egbedun had praised the governor for his transparency, prudence and accountability in the management of state finance and resources, assuring him of the support of the legislature for the executive arm in the running of the state. “The implementation of previous budgets, particularly the 2024 and 2025 plans, has produced measurable outcomes in infrastructure, education, healthcare, social inclusion, and workers’ welfare. These successes are evidence of a government determined to turn policy into tangible benefits for the people. “Your Excellency has displayed exceptional leadership, wisdom, and composure in navigating the State through challenging periods. The House notes with appreciation your restraint, diplomacy, and dedication to peace during the Local Government administration disputes, which, if mishandled, could have undermined stability. “Your approach, grounded in fairness, dialogue, and the rule of law, demonstrates statesmanship of the highest order. I would also like to highlight and commend your prudence in financial management, especially under the constraints arising from the withholding of Local Government allocations by the Federal Government since March 2025. “Despite these challenges, your administration has consistently met its obligations, maintained developmental projects, and safeguarded workers’ welfare – a testament to visionary and responsible leadership.” The Speaker said that the House would conduct careful legislative scrutiny to ensure that the budget reflects the hopes and aspirations of the people of Osun State. “Every allocation must serve the public interest and contribute meaningfully to sustainable development across all sectors”
I have read competing perspectives on the correctitude (or lack thereof) of FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and Lt. A.M. Yerima’s conduct in the viral video of their gladiatorial rhetorical combat. My concern, however, is different. Several social media commentators, irrespective of partisan affiliations, appear united in proclaiming that Wike finally “met his match” in Yerima. Interestingly, the Wike-Yerima confrontation reminded me of a puzzlingly paradoxical but deeply philosophical aphorism we were fond of as student union activists in the 1990s. We used to say that when an unstoppable force (which Wike fancies himself as and which many people ascribe to him in light of his unfailingly boisterous, venomous-tongued cantankerousness that causes him to get whatever he wants all the time) meets an immovable object (which Yerima unwittingly became), something has to give. Yerima has emerged, without planning to, as the first person, at least publicly, to make it clear to Wike that although Wike has acquired well-earned notoriety as a vicious, perpetually drunk, psychotic pocket tyrant who railroads people into kowtowing to him through intimidation, boozy taunts, and primitive vituperative aggression, he is “not a fool” who yields to inebriated, power-drunk, geriatric bullies. Yerima’s repeated refrain of “I am not a fool, sir,” in response to Wike’s crude, unwarranted insults transcended a mere forceful retort. It communicated respectful but firm defiance to an insufferably self-important ministerial hoodlum. Many people almost heard Yerima as saying, “I am not Fubara, sir.” Fool and Fubara almost have the same phonetic beginnings. Of course, I know that this is taking an innocuous, unplanned resistance to pocket tyranny to a partisan terrain. But I am using Fubara here as the most recognized referent for disempowering spinelessness in the face of Wikean terrorization. And it helps that fool and Fubara share a curious, even if meaningless, initial pronunciational kinship, at least in demotic Nigerian English speech. My second thought is on the admirable unflappability, courage, and self-assuredness that Yerima evinced in his encounter with Wike. There are vast generational, symbolic, social, and even political asymmetries between the two. But Yerima was not the least perturbed. He stood his ground and caused Wike to beat a humiliating retreat. You don’t buy that kind of valor and self-confidence in the market. You unconsciously cultivate it from an impressionable age. It came as no surprise when it emerged that Yerima is the scion of an upper-crust military family. Yet, at least from the video clips I saw, Yerima didn’t come across as arrogant or as someone who has a chip on his shoulder. But he showed that he wasn’t a fainthearted pushover, ether. His father must have taught him a version of one of my favorite Malcolm Xian exhortations: “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.” Yerima was polite, cordial, and conciliatory, but when Wike metaphorically put his rude, lowbred, insult-stained hand on the young man, he sent Wike to the rhetorical cemetery. Malcolm X characterized that as teaching people not to “suffer peacefully.” My final thought on the confrontation is the almost involuntary predilection for gerontocratic egotism among older people in Nigeria when they have any dealings with younger people. I called this “reverse ageism” in an August 11, 2022, article I wrote titled “Reverse Ageism as a Tool to Gag Criticism in Nigeria.” I reproduce the last few paragraphs of the article below because they speak to Wike’s gerontocratic putdown of Yerima as a “small boy” who was in “primary school” when he graduated from the university. I wrote: “One of Nigeria’s enduringly lumbering cultural burdens is that it’s hopelessly trapped in regressive reverse ageism, i.e., the idea that only old age, not youth or knowledge, should confer authority on people. “Everyone who is older than the next person thinks his numerical age bestows some superiority on him over another. “Emotional and intellectual age are immaterial in this culture of reverse ageism, so that even emotionally and cognitively immature dimwits trapped in adults’ bodies think of themselves as superior to biologically younger but intellectually superior people because of the accidents of their years of birth. “But if you’re older than someone, someone is also older than you are, and the person you’re older than is also older than someone else. It’s an infinite continuum. “Only backward, lowbrow bumpkins are hung up on age and invoke it to delegitimize valid criticism that they can’t confront with the resources of logic and evidence. “Anyone who is over the age of 25 is a full-grown adult.” Everything I wrote in that three-year-old article applies to Wike. Yerima (incidentally, Yerima is the Kanuri word for “prince,” which most northern Nigerian ethnic groups, including people of northern Edo, now bear as a personal name) is infinitely more mature and certainly more dignified than Wike can ever be in a million lifetimes, in spite of his youth. So, who cares if Wike is older than Methuselah, especially because he behaves like a rambunctious toddler uneasily stuck in an adult’s body?
“I’m not one of those kinds of persons that will succumb to blackmail or intimidation. “It’s really unfortunate, and you heard what the officer said, that he was sent by the former Chief of Naval Staff. I don’t understand how somebody who attained that position and he sees that he has a problem, cannot approach my office to explain what is going on. Or simply because he’s a military man, he felt he could use that to intimidate Nigerians.” The minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, made the statement shortly after he encountered a bitter confrontation with military officers from the Nigerian Navy on a piece of land under development in Gaduwa District, along the corridor of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu Way in the FCT. The land in dispute belongs to the former Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Awwal Zubairu Gambo. Speaking to newsmen shortly after the tense standoff, Wike condemned the actions, describing them as an act of lawlessness on the part of the Nigerian military. The minister vowed that retired Vice Admiral Gambo would not be allowed to carry out what he called “this illegal development and land grabbing, simply because he was a former Chief of Naval Staff. I will not allow that.” He said that he had instructed his men to make sure that the construction is halted forthwith because the owner has no legal paper in terms of building approval or even acquisition of the land. The Minister questioned the use of military personnel to protect what he described as a clear case of illegal development and land grabbing and vowed that he will not allow such to continue. “You can imagine where you cannot even prove that you have the documents. You don’t have the title documents and you don’t have the approval for building. “How can we continue to allow lawlessness to prevail in this country? What about those who don’t have the military? What about those who don’t have security?” The Minister said that he has already engaged the Chief of Defence Staff and the Chief of Naval Staff, both of whom have assured him that they will intervene to resolve the matter.
Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyeson Wike rained insults on one of the soldiers drafted by high military authority to stop him from having access to a plot of land belong to the Military Chief. In bitter exchanges of words, the minister called the soldier in full military uniform a fool. “You are a full” the minister thundered, to which the soldier responded “I am not a fool.” Video clips of the confrontation between the minister and the military personnel has been trending in social media in the last two hours today, November 11. It is not clear where the plot of land is located, but Wike was overheard ordering the officer:“shut up, keep quiet, you are a fool. As at the time I graduated, you were still in primary school,” Wike raged. Referring to their boss who drafted them to the land, Wike raged on: “you send soldiers to intimidate who? We are all from this country. If not for the CDS who spoke to me now, you would have to kill everybody here,” but the soldier responded: “we are not going to kill anybody.” The minister went on: “I am not one of those that you can intimidate. Wike stressed that the land had no required documents, but the soldier said “the land has papers sir.” Reacting to the bitter contribution, Wike’s media aide, Lere Olayinka, in a post on his official Facebook page, said: “Because he was told to stop building on a land he has no title document and building approval, former Chief of Naval Staff, Vice Admiral Awwal Zubairu Gambo, sent his armed military security details to attack men of the FCTA Department of Development Control. “He also stationed armed military men to protect the illegal development, with the military men threatening to shoot anyone who interfered with them. “Today, the FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, visited the site after talking to the Chief of Defence Staff on the phone.”
Lagos State Police Command has declared the publisher of Sahara Reporters online newspaper, Omoyele Sowore, a wanted person. The Command’s Commissioner, Olohundare Jimoh, at a strategic security meeting at the command headquarters in Ikeja today, November 10, said that Sowore is wanted for allegedly Inciting violent protest in Lagos. He said that the Police had extended an invitation to the online publisher but that he has so far failed to show up. The Commissioner, therefore, ordered Police officers to arrest Sowore wherever he is found and bring him to the State Criminal Investigation Department for proper investigation. He said that despite an earlier letter from Sowore’s lawyer expressing his intention to bring Sowore to the command, none of them had shown up. Jimoh said that Sowore was first declared wanted in accordance with Section 215 (1, 4, and 5) of the Nigerian Constitution, which empowered the Commissioner of Police to maintain law and order and protect lives and property. “He never showed up. If you are declared wanted, you are to report to the nearest police station, not call me over the phone. “The order to arrest him stands. Any officer who sights him, whether on the road, in a restaurant, or elsewhere, should arrest him and bring him to the State Criminal Investigation Department for proper investigation,” the Police boss said.
The Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) has declared former Minister of State for Petroleum Resources, Timipre Sylva wanted for alleged diversion of the sum of $14,859,257. The Commission, in a notice published on its X page today, November 10, said that the money is part of funds injected by the Nigerian Content Development and Monitoring Board (NCDMB) into Atlantic International Refinery and Petrochemical Limited for the construction of a Refinery. The notice begins by saying: “The public is hereby notified that TIMIPRE SYLVA, a former Minister of State, Petroleum Resources, and former Governor of Bayelsa State, whose photograph appears above is wanted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) in an alleged case of Conspiracy and Dishonest Conversion of $14,859,257… ” Sylva, 61, is from Brass Local Government Area of Bayelsa State. This notice is pursuant to a November 6, 2025 warrant of the Lagos State High Court. “Anybody with useful information as to his whereabouts should please contact the Commission in its Ibadan, Uyo, Sokoto, Maiduguri, Benin, Makurdi, Kaduna, Ilorin, Enugu, Kano, Lagos, Gombe, Port Harcourt or Abuja offices or through 08093322644; its e-mail address: info@efcc.gov.ng or the nearest Police Station and other security agencies.”
Donald Trump, the 47th President of the United States, released a video on Truth Social threatening military action against Nigeria by stating: “I will do things to Nigeria that Nigeria is not going to be happy about” and threatening to “go into that now-disgraced country guns-a-blazing.” Trump then claimed there is a genocide against Christians in Nigeria, instructing the Department of War to prepare for possible action, drawing a parallel to what he described as attacks on Christians. This narrative about Nigeria did not begin with Trump. In recent months, campaigners and Washington politicians have alleged that Islamist militants systematically target Nigerian Christians. In September, TV host, Bill Maher called it “genocide,” and Senator Ted Cruz, citing his Christian faith and support for Israel, echoed these claims. At a February 2025 congressional hearing, Rep. Scott Perry asserted—ironically, given past US foreign policy—that USAID funnelled millions yearly through non-profits to Boko Haram, a group notorious for brutally targeting both Muslims and Christians across Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, and Niger. Hasn’t Trump/US just whitewashed al-Jolani, the ISIS (same root as Boko Haram) warlord, whom they installed as the President of Syria? They once offered a $10 million bounty on him! Calls about Christian genocide in Nigeria grew after Vice President Kashim Shettima’s speech at the 80th UN General Assembly in September. His words seemed to provoke those who profess love for Israel, directing their focus to Nigeria. Here’s part of his speech: “We do not believe that the sanctity of human life should be trapped in the corridors of endless debate. That is why we say, without stuttering and without doubt, that a two-state solution remains the most dignified path to lasting peace for the people of Palestine. For too long, this community has borne the weight of moral conflict. For too long, we have been caught in the crossfire of violence that has opened humanity’s conscience. “We come not as partisans, but as peacemakers. We come as brothers and sisters of a shared world, a world that must never reduce the right to live into the currency of devious politics. The people of Palestine are not collateral damage in a civilisation searching for order. They are human beings, equal in worth, entitled to the same freedoms and dignity that the rest of us take for granted.” To ground this controversy, it is necessary to define genocide. It is the deliberate and systematic killing or persecution of a large number of people from a particular national or ethnic group to destroy that nation or group. “Genocide” was first coined by Polish lawyer, Raphaël Lemkin in 1944 in his book Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. It consists of the Greek prefix genos, meaning race or tribe, and the Latin suffix – cide, meaning killing. Lemkin developed the term partly in response to the Nazi policies of systematic murder of Jews during the Holocaust, but also in response to previous instances in history of targeted actions aimed at the destruction of particular groups of people. Articles 1 and 2 of UN General Assembly Resolution 96 (I), dated 11 December 1946, recognise genocide as a crime under international law, against the UN’s purpose, and condemned globally. I tell whoever cares to listen that genocide does not describe the Nigerian situation. In this country, no religious group is targeted for its beliefs. Killers using Islam as a cover have killed more Muslims than Christians. Anyone who refuses their ideology—Muslim, Christian, animist, pagan, idolater—is a target. I was a victim when they came to my house in Potiskum to kill me. Not finding me, they used explosives to destroy the house. In Gaza, several authorities allege that Israel’s actions are premeditated. A UN Commission of Inquiry accused Israel of acts of genocide, with Gaza meeting four of the five genocidal criteria from the 1948 Genocide Convention: killing, causing serious harm, imposing destructive life conditions, and preventing births. The report contrasted with Nigeria, where no group faces intended destruction. On 21 November 2024, after probing war crimes and crimes against humanity, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for two Israeli leaders—Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant—for alleged war crimes of starvation and crimes against humanity during the Gaza war. All 125 ICC member states are to arrest them if they enter their territory. America’s steadfast support for Israel, even with the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel’s actions in the Palestinian territories are illegal, starkly reveals a double standard. This contradiction undermines America’s claims of moral leadership and exposes the inconsistency in its foreign policy when compared to its calls for justice elsewhere, such as in Nigeria. In Gaza, an Israeli airstrike has targeted one of the oldest active churches in the world, the 1,600-year-old Church of Saint Porphyrius, built in 425 CE, with the main part constructed by the Crusaders in the 1150s, located in the Zaytun Quarters of Gaza City, killing at least 18 civilians. It also targeted the Byzantine Church of Jabalia, approximately 1,578 years old, which was established in the 5th century AD. It was built around 444 AD during the reign of the Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II. The Church of St. Hilarion Monastery/Tell Umm Amer, approximately 1,685 years old, founded in the fourth century CE (around 340 CE) by Saint Hilarion the Great, was also attacked by Israel. The monastery is one of the earliest and largest monastic communities in the Middle East. The Holy Family Church, the only Catholic church in Gaza, was built in 1974, making it approximately 50 years old. This church and its associated school have been hit multiple times by Israeli airstrikes and tank fire, resulting in casualties and damage to the premises. Israel also attacked the Gaza Baptist Church, founded in 1954, which is approximately 70 years old. These churches are considered vital parts of Gaza’s cultural heritage and have historically served as sanctuaries for both Christians and Muslims during conflicts. These attacks have also brought down the population of Christians in Gaza to half what it used to be two years ago. The US, which has supplied at least $21.7 billion in military aid to Israel’s Gaza campaign, refused to attend the Universal Periodic Review of its human rights record before the UN Human Rights Council last Friday. The US knew that all 193 UN member states would examine its role in Gaza. There are Christians in Gaza, Palestine, and Lebanon. For the record, only the US and Israel have skipped the UN rights review. Yet for these reprehensible actions and ongoing evasion of accountability, no one has called out Trump – twice impeached, indicted by the courts, and now busily collecting gifts from Arab leaders – or his country, now-disgraced. NEXT There are some questions that we need to answer for us to get a clear perspective of Trump’s threat, considering that he wants to invade Venezuela, which is ninety-eight percent Christian, with eighty percent of them Catholic. Or why has he opened the door for South African whites to move to the USA and not his “cherished” Nigerian Christians! We will even look deeper to understand whether they want boots on the ground now because what (mineral resources) they have been getting through their sponsored thugs is not enough. Or is it still the divinely defeated grand design to dismember this country in 2015 that is coming back through the back door? Or will this serve as a wake-up call to Nigeria? And we will also look at the revolution Governor Mai Mala Buni has brought to the Yobe State Civil Service by appointing Alhaji Abdullahi Musa Shehu as Head of Service. It is one appointment the state has not seen in a long time, and the state’s civil service has already started responding positively to it. Hassan Gimba is the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Neptune Prime.
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3 Quick Thoughts On Wike And Yerima Encounter, By Farooq Kperogi
I have read competing perspectives on the correctitude (or lack thereof) of FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and Lt. A.M. Yerima’s conduct in the viral video of their gladiatorial rhetorical combat. My concern, however, is different.
Several social media commentators, irrespective of partisan affiliations, appear united in proclaiming that Wike finally “met his match” in Yerima.
Interestingly, the Wike-Yerima confrontation reminded me of a puzzlingly paradoxical but deeply philosophical aphorism we were fond of as student union activists in the 1990s.
We used to say that when an unstoppable force (which Wike fancies himself as and which many people ascribe to him in light of his unfailingly boisterous, venomous-tongued cantankerousness that causes him to get whatever he wants all the time) meets an immovable object (which Yerima unwittingly became), something has to give.
Yerima has emerged, without planning to, as the first person, at least publicly, to make it clear to Wike that although Wike has acquired well-earned notoriety as a vicious, perpetually drunk, psychotic pocket tyrant who railroads people into kowtowing to him through intimidation, boozy taunts, and primitive vituperative aggression, he is “not a fool” who yields to inebriated, power-drunk, geriatric bullies.
Yerima’s repeated refrain of “I am not a fool, sir,” in response to Wike’s crude, unwarranted insults transcended a mere forceful retort. It communicated respectful but firm defiance to an insufferably self-important ministerial hoodlum.
Many people almost heard Yerima as saying, “I am not Fubara, sir.” Fool and Fubara almost have the same phonetic beginnings. Of course, I know that this is taking an innocuous, unplanned resistance to pocket tyranny to a partisan terrain.
But I am using Fubara here as the most recognized referent for disempowering spinelessness in the face of Wikean terrorization. And it helps that fool and Fubara share a curious, even if meaningless, initial pronunciational kinship, at least in demotic Nigerian English speech.
My second thought is on the admirable unflappability, courage, and self-assuredness that Yerima evinced in his encounter with Wike. There are vast generational, symbolic, social, and even political asymmetries between the two. But Yerima was not the least perturbed. He stood his ground and caused Wike to beat a humiliating retreat.
You don’t buy that kind of valor and self-confidence in the market. You unconsciously cultivate it from an impressionable age. It came as no surprise when it emerged that Yerima is the scion of an upper-crust military family.
Yet, at least from the video clips I saw, Yerima didn’t come across as arrogant or as someone who has a chip on his shoulder. But he showed that he wasn’t a fainthearted pushover, ether.
His father must have taught him a version of one of my favorite Malcolm Xian exhortations: “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”
Yerima was polite, cordial, and conciliatory, but when Wike metaphorically put his rude, lowbred, insult-stained hand on the young man, he sent Wike to the rhetorical cemetery. Malcolm X characterized that as teaching people not to “suffer peacefully.”
My final thought on the confrontation is the almost involuntary predilection for gerontocratic egotism among older people in Nigeria when they have any dealings with younger people. I called this “reverse ageism” in an August 11, 2022, article I wrote titled “Reverse Ageism as a Tool to Gag Criticism in Nigeria.”
I reproduce the last few paragraphs of the article below because they speak to Wike’s gerontocratic putdown of Yerima as a “small boy” who was in “primary school” when he graduated from the university.
I wrote:
“One of Nigeria’s enduringly lumbering cultural burdens is that it’s hopelessly trapped in regressive reverse ageism, i.e., the idea that only old age, not youth or knowledge, should confer authority on people.
“Everyone who is older than the next person thinks his numerical age bestows some superiority on him over another.
“Emotional and intellectual age are immaterial in this culture of reverse ageism, so that even emotionally and cognitively immature dimwits trapped in adults’ bodies think of themselves as superior to biologically younger but intellectually superior people because of the accidents of their years of birth.
“But if you’re older than someone, someone is also older than you are, and the person you’re older than is also older than someone else. It’s an infinite continuum.
“Only backward, lowbrow bumpkins are hung up on age and invoke it to delegitimize valid criticism that they can’t confront with the resources of logic and evidence.
“Anyone who is over the age of 25 is a full-grown adult.”
Everything I wrote in that three-year-old article applies to Wike. Yerima (incidentally, Yerima is the Kanuri word for “prince,” which most northern Nigerian ethnic groups, including people of northern Edo, now bear as a personal name) is infinitely more mature and certainly more dignified than Wike can ever be in a million lifetimes, in spite of his youth.
So, who cares if Wike is older than Methuselah, especially because he behaves like a rambunctious toddler uneasily stuck in an adult’s body?