By Osamhanze Idahosa
A peculiar kind of fear grips a ruling party when its coalition arithmetic no longer adds up, and Nigeria’s All Progressives Congress is living through it. On the surface, the story is simple: Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory and, by card-carrying membership, still a leader of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, has been accused by the APC Governors’ Forum of working against President Bola Tinubu’s re-election. Underneath that surface, however, is a far more revealing story about governance, internal democracy, and the political cost of treating power as an inheritance rather than a performance review.
Let us be honest about the sequence of events. Wike joined the Tinubu government as a strategic bridge — a PDP heavyweight whose presence in the cabinet would blunt opposition unity and lend the administration a cross-party sheen. He accepted the role with an unusual and, for Nigerian politics, almost unfashionable clarity: he would serve the President loyally in office while keeping his own political house, the PDP structure in Rivers State and beyond, intact. That was never a secret arrangement. It was the deal, stated openly from day one. 
What has changed is not Wike’s position. What has changed is that his hybrid arrangement, once tolerated as a curious footnote, has become politically dangerous to a specific class of APC governors — and it is worth naming why.
The Primaries Came Home to Roost
Across several states, the APC’s primary election season was less a democratic exercise than a coronation.
Sitting governors and their anointed successors cleared the field through disqualifications, last-minute substitutions, and delegate lists that read more like loyalty registers than voter rolls. Heavyweights with genuine grassroots followings — men and women who had built name recognition, delivered constituency projects, or simply outworked the anointed candidate — were shown the door. Some were persuaded to “wait their turn.” Others were not persuaded at all.
Politics abhors a vacuum, and disenchanted heavyweights do not simply retire from public life because a governor prefers someone else. They look for a vehicle. Right now, the PDP structure that Wike has kept oiled and functional — even while sitting in an APC cabinet — is the most obvious vehicle available. That is not Wike engineering a rebellion; that is Wike’s continued political relevance meeting a supply of aggrieved politicians that the APC governors themselves created.
Whose Nightmare, Exactly?
It is important to be precise about who is actually frightened, because “the APC” is not a single, undifferentiated body with one uniform interest.
The governors sounding the loudest alarm tend to fall into two overlapping categories. First, governors who cannot seek re-election and have instead positioned themselves — or their preferred proxies — for Senate seats or other offices, and who now worry that a resurgent opposition vehicle could deny them or their anointed successors a soft landing. Second, and more damning, governors and their candidates whose only real campaign asset is proximity to the President’s name, because their own tenure in office has not generated a record voters would queue up to reward.
Put simply: the governors are not afraid of Wike as a person. They fear what an alternative platform does to a race they planned to win by default. A governor with roads, schools, hospitals, and jobs to show for two terms does not lie awake worrying that a PDP structure exists in the next local government. It is the governor — or the imposed proxy — with nothing but a party logo and the President’s coattails who feels the tremor.
A Forum Resolution Is Not a Governance Plan
The APC Governors’ Forum’s response — resolving to reject any “alliance or political arrangement” that could undermine the President’s re-election or the party’s candidates — is a legitimate defensive move on paper. No party is obliged to tolerate parallel structures that split its votes. But a resolution passed in a closed-door meeting in Abuja does not, by itself, rebuild the trust that a mismanaged primary destroyed in a local ward. It does not return a disqualified aspirant’s confidence in the process. It does not convert an imposed candidate into a popular one. Institutional discipline can constrain Wike’s coalition partners at the margins; it cannot manufacture the credibility that internal democracy would have produced for free.
The Lesson, Stated Plainly
Wike’s sphere of direct political command is one state out of thirty-six. That a single minister with a one-state base can rattle an entire governors’ forum controlling more than two-thirds of the federation is not a testament to his genius alone — it is an indictment of how thinly some of these governors’ popularity is actually rooted. Politicians who open their primaries, let the ballot decide, and then spend their tenure governing rather than merely occupying office need not fear an opposition figure of any size. Their performance becomes their coalition. Their record becomes their firewall.
The APC governors’ nightmare, then, is not really Nyesom Wike. It is the mirror he has, perhaps unintentionally, held up to their own governance report cards. Until they learn that lesson, every election cycle will produce a new version of this same anxiety, regardless of which minister or opposition figure happens to be standing nearby when the aggrieved go looking for a platform.
Dr Idahosa Oshamanze is the Vice President of Africa Development Study Centre, ADSC, he wrote from Abuja.
