Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
There is a particular kind of politician who confuses a public office with a personal title deed. This week, at his monthly media chat in Abuja, Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, showed us exactly what that looks like. He told the opposition to cancel Rivers State from their calculations, declaring that the only person who can count Rivers is Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.
He said he was speaking as a political realist because he knows his people.
That is the problem, precisely. Wike does not know his people. He owns a structure, he rents a few loudspeakers, and he has mistaken the noise for a mandate.
A state is not a personal estate, and its citizens are not tenants who vote as the landlord instructs.
A STATE IS NOT A PERSONAL ESTATE
Rivers State does not belong to Bola Tinubu. It does not belong to Nyesom Wike either. It belongs to the fishermen of the creeks, the traders of Diobu, the students of Uniport and the workers of Trans Amadi. In a democracy, the only instrument that can count Rivers is the ballot, and the ballot has never once asked Wike for permission.
For a man who built an entire career telling anyone who would listen that power belongs to the people, it is a stunning collapse of principle to now stand before cameras and hand an entire state to one candidate as though it were a family compound to be shared after a funeral.
Nigerians heard him, and they did not applaud. They recognised the voice of a man who has begun to speak of citizens the way a feudal lord speaks of serfs.
THE MAN WHO EMPTIED THE GOVERNMENT HOUSE
Before Wike lectures anyone on who owns Rivers, he owes the state an apology it has not yet received.
Let us recall what his appetite for control cost Rivers people. In March 2025, at the height of a bitter power struggle between Wike and his own successor, Governor Siminalayi Fubara, a state of emergency was proclaimed over Rivers. The elected Governor was suspended. The elected Deputy Governor was suspended. The entire House of Assembly was suspended. For six months, one of the richest states in Nigeria was handed to a single unelected sole administrator, while its people sat without the government they had voted for.
This is the record. A quarrel that grew out of one man’s determination to keep his grip on the structure he built as governor ended with the people of Rivers stripped of their elected leadership for half a year.
And when the dust settled, note what the man of the people reportedly walked away with. Control of the chairmanships across the local government areas. An arrangement under which his successor would not return to seek a second term. That was never a fight for Rivers. It was a fight for Rivers to remain Wike’s property.
The man who emptied the Government House of its elected occupants now stands in Abuja and tells us he owns the votes.
So when Wike declares that only one person can count Rivers, understand what he is really saying. He is not describing the will of the people. He is describing the machinery he spent years building and would suspend a whole democracy to protect.
THE NUMBERS WIKE HOPES YOU HAVE FORGOTTEN
Return to the last presidential election, the very one Wike parades as proof. In 2023 he was the sitting governor and his machinery worked openly for Bola Tinubu. Every lever of the state was his to pull. And with all of it in his hands, what was the result he could actually produce?
The Independent National Electoral Commission declared Tinubu the winner in Rivers with 231,591 votes. Peter Obi of the Labour Party came second with 175,071. Atiku Abubakar, then of the PDP and running straight into Wike’s open sabotage, still gathered 88,468.
Now do the arithmetic the minister would rather you skip. Put the Labour Party and PDP figures side by side and the vote cast against Tinubu in Rivers stood at 263,539, comfortably above the 231,591 credited to the APC. Read that again. Even in the year the machine was fully switched on for the President, more Rivers people voted against him than for him. The one thing that rescued the day was that this majority was split in two.
And here is the part that should end the boast completely. Even that declared figure may not have been real.
HOW THE RIVERS RESULT WAS WRITTEN
Rivers in 2023 was not lost at the polling unit. It was rewritten at the collation centre.
Begin with the commission’s own portal. Weeks passed before the presidential results were uploaded to the INEC viewing platform, and when the Rivers figures finally appeared, several media houses and civil society groups reached the same finding. On the results as recorded at the polling units, it was Peter Obi, not Bola Tinubu, who had won Rivers, with some analyses putting his true lead at around one hundred thousand votes. INEC has denied any manipulation and maintained that the declared figures reflected the vote.
Then came the forensic work. The BBC examined the sheets from more than six thousand Rivers polling units and reported that Tinubu’s official total had been inflated by roughly 106,000 votes above the polling unit tally, close to a doubling of his figure in the state, while Obi’s total had been cut by more than 50,000. Its conclusion was blunt. On the votes actually cast, Obi had won Rivers. Premium Times, working on its own, arrived at the same verdict.
See how it was done, in one case the BBC traced to the state collation. An official who gave his name as Dr Dickson Ariaga read the figures for one local government live on television. For most parties the numbers matched the sheet. But for the APC he announced 16,630 where the sheet showed 2,731. For the Labour Party he announced 10,784 where the sheet showed 22,289, more than halving Obi’s vote in a single breath. When the BBC checked the college where the man claimed to work, its records held no such staff member.
Consider, too, the declaration from Wike’s own Obio Akpor, which handed Tinubu 80,239 votes to Obi’s 3,829, in a dense urban area where Obi’s movement was at its strongest almost everywhere else in the South.
This is not opposition noise. It is the record of international and Nigerian investigations, and it is confirmed from the most unlikely quarter of all. Rotimi Amaechi himself, the very man now on the Atiku ticket, has stated plainly that Peter Obi convincingly won Rivers in 2023, whatever the announcement claimed.
Rivers did not vote for Tinubu in 2023. Rivers was declared for him.
So when Wike says only Tinubu can count Rivers, hear the sentence for what it is. It is not a boast about voters. It is a boast about who holds the pen at the collation table.
WHAT HAS CHANGED SINCE
Now take away the two things that made 2023 possible.
The first was a saboteur inside the tent. In 2023 Atiku ran with a knife in his own back, a party man delivering the state to the APC while still wearing PDP colours. That saboteur is no longer within the camp. He is outside now, in his federal cap, shouting from Abuja, and the ADC he attacks harbours no such traitor in its ranks.
The opposition, it is true, is spread across more than one platform. Atiku leads the ADC with Amaechi beside him, while Peter Obi now carries the flag of the NDC. Wike will tell you this division alone hands him Rivers. It does not, and for a reason he keeps stepping around. The majority in Rivers that refused Tinubu was never in question, even inside a rigged count. What the Atiku ticket lacked in 2023 was a son of the soil who could hold the polling units and guard the very collation centres where the state was quietly taken.
That gap is now closed. Rotimi Amaechi, who served two full terms as Governor of Rivers and holds structure in all its local governments, stands today as Atiku’s running mate. The man Wike labours so hard to belittle is precisely the man who makes a repeat of the 2023 heist far harder to pull off.
You cannot quietly rewrite a state a second time when the whole country has seen how it was written the first.
A STATE CAPTURED IS NOT A STATE WON
Wike would have Nigeria believe that Rivers stands happily behind him. The leaders of Rivers tell a very different story.
When the elected Governor was suspended and the state placed in the hands of a sole administrator, it was not the opposition alone that cried out. The Ijaw National Congress and the Rivers State Elders and Leaders Council condemned the treatment of Siminalayi Fubara and the moves against his government as a violation of the will of the people. High Chief Sunny Chukumele, convener of the Coalition of Rivers State Leaders of Thought, refused to dress it up. He said the state had been captured. He called the arrangement handed to Rivers the peace of the graveyard. He said Rivers had been marched back to Egypt.
And note the sting in his warning. He said the future of Rivers would in the end be decided not by the men who seized it, but by the people.
That is the sentiment Wike papers over with his coalition of conveniences. Rivers people watched a governor they had elected suspended for six months, then pressed into a settlement that surrendered the very structures they voted to place in his hands. They were asked to call their humiliation peace. They have not forgotten who engineered it, nor who in Abuja signed the proclamation that made it possible.
A structure imposed on a people is not the same thing as a people won.
And here, precisely, is why the Amaechi factor cannot be waved away. Resentment without a vehicle is only a murmur. Rotimi Amaechi gives it a vehicle.
For the first time since this humiliation, the feeling against Wike in Rivers has a son of the soil on a serious national ticket. A former governor who served the state for two full terms, who owes Wike nothing, answers to Wike for nothing, and carries his own structure into every local government in Rivers. Every elder who called the capture by its name, and every voter who watched a mandate overridden, now has somewhere to place that anger on 16 January 2027, and it is the Atiku and Amaechi ticket of the ADC.
Wike grasps this better than anyone. It is the very reason he spent his media chat trying to shrink Amaechi to a chequebook. You do not labour that hard to bury a man you believe is already dead.
The louder Wike insists that Amaechi is nothing, the more he confesses what Amaechi has become.
THE ARITHMETIC OF FEAR
Notice, too, what the boast quietly admits. Wike is worried about turnout.
Ask a simple question. If Rivers truly belonged to the President, if the support were as total as the minister pretends, why would voter apathy trouble anyone on that side at all? A candidate who genuinely owns a state prays for the highest turnout imaginable, because every extra voter only deepens the margin.
The politician who fears a full turnout is the politician who knows the empty booth is his only friend. You do not need people to stay home when you are certain they are with you. You need them to stay home when you suspect they are not.
A structure that survives only on a low turnout is not a movement. It is a manipulation.
A MINISTER WITHOUT A PARTY
Consider the strangeness of the messenger. Here is a serving federal minister in a Tinubu government, nominally still a member of the Peoples Democratic Party, campaigning openly for the ruling All Progressives Congress, and now assembling what he calls a coalition of the PDP, APC, Labour Party and Action Alliance, all pointed at one man’s re-election.
Strip away the theatre and that is a confession. When every party is the same party, there is no party at all. There is only power, and the pursuit of it for its own sake.
Remember also who is speaking. In 2023, Nyesom Wike contested his party’s presidential primary and lost to Atiku Abubakar. The man now insisting the opposition has no path was, only the day before yesterday, standing in that same opposition, chasing that same office, beaten by that same Atiku. His quarrel is not with our arithmetic. His quarrel is with his own diary.
THE BITTERNESS BEHIND THE BOAST
The most revealing part of the media chat was not even about Tinubu. It was about Rotimi Amaechi.
Wike claimed the former governor has no electoral value in Rivers or the South South, and suggested the only reason Amaechi could have been chosen as a running mate was money. That is not analysis. That is an old wound talking.
Deal with the facts the minister hopes you will forget. Rotimi Amaechi served two terms as Governor of Rivers State. He chaired the Nigeria Governors Forum. He was twice appointed Director General of the presidential campaign that carried Muhammadu Buhari into Aso Rock, in 2015 and again in 2019. Whatever anyone thinks of those years, this is not the record of a man with no electoral value. It is the record of a man who twice organised the machinery that produced a president of Nigeria.
The African Democratic Congress has since presented Atiku Abubakar and Rotimi Amaechi as its ticket for the 16 January 2027 presidential election, a pairing the party has described as a unity and rescue ticket that bridges regions and traditions. That is the ticket Wike is so desperate to wave away.
But bitterness is a poor political strategist. A man cannot spend a whole media chat insulting an opponent he insists is irrelevant. You do not shout down a ghost.
You only attack this hard the men you are truly afraid of.
DELIVER YOUR POLLING UNIT
We will, for once, agree with the minister on something. At that same media chat, he warned his own followers that television will not give them votes, and that what gives votes is going to the polling units, the wards and the local governments. Deliver your polling unit, he said. Deliver your ward. Deliver your local government.
Excellent advice. He should try taking it himself.
Because while he performs for the cameras and cancels states from a podium in Abuja, the men and women of the ADC in Rivers are doing the quiet work he just described. Ward by ward. Booth by booth. The very grassroots he pretends to command are being reorganised by the very coalition he pretends to have buried.
So here is our reply to the arrogance from Abuja. Nobody is cancelling Rivers. Rivers will speak for itself, in its own voice, at its own polling units, and no minister’s ego is large enough to sit inside the ballot box on the people’s behalf.
Rivers is not for sale, not for rent, and certainly not for cancellation.
On 16 January 2027, the people of Rivers State will remind Nyesom Wike of a truth he mislaid somewhere in the comfort of federal office. In a democracy, no man owns a people. The people own the mandate, and they will give it to whom they please.
They may yet choose to teach the landlord that the house was never his.
Aare Amerijoye DOT.B
Director General,
The Narrative Force
thenarrativeforce.org
6 August 2026
