Letters from Stockholm — Kio Amachree
Open TikTok on any given day and there he is. The gravel voice. The raised finger. The dance. Nyesom Wike, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, holding court from a high chair while a room full of journalists — summoned, seated, and in too many cases paid — nod along to another hour of a man in love with the sound of himself.
I have watched power up close for most of my life. I did my National Service inside the Shagari presidency and the National Assembly. I have seen men who were genuinely dangerous, and they had one thing in common: they did not announce themselves. They did not boast on camera. They did not hand the prosecution its exhibits in advance.
Wike does. Every week. On a loop.
He tells us, in his own words and with his own chest, how elections are “delivered”. He tells us who he made and who he will unmake. He threatens broadcasters on live television and then calls it figurative. He stumbles through state occasions in a condition that Nigerians have long stopped pretending not to notice. And all of it is recorded, timestamped, geotagged and archived — not by his enemies, but by his own media team and his own adoring followers.
That is the madness of the Wike show. It is not that a powerful Nigerian politician is behaving badly. We have seen that before. It is that he is doing it openly, gleefully, as content. Nothing like it has been seen in this Republic. Abacha did not do TikTok.
Here is what I know about how these stories end, because I have watched the ending more than once.
The sycophants go first. The men who shout his name in the hall today will be the first to say they barely knew him. The “stakeholders” will discover they always had reservations. The journalists will suddenly remember they are journalists.
Then the paper trail is opened. Not by Wike’s rivals, but by whoever needs a sacrifice when the political weather turns — and in Nigeria it always turns. Every account, in every jurisdiction, bearing his name or the names of his children, will be examined. Every property, every “gift”, every company registered in a hurry. The same videos he posts for applause will be played in a different room, before a different audience, for a very different purpose.
And then the loudest man in Abuja will be very quiet.
Psychologists have a word for a man who cannot stop showing you how big he is: insecure. The dancing, the shouting, the humiliation of anyone who dares to disagree — this is not strength. It is the behaviour of someone still trying to prove something to the people who once overlooked him. The tragedy is that he is proving it to the wrong audience, in the wrong way, on the permanent record.
I do not see a victorious Wike in the near future. I see a Black Maria. I see a man sober for the first time in a long while, sitting in the back of it, finally understanding that every minute of footage he was so proud of has been playing to a jury all along.
Nigeria does not need to defeat Nyesom Wike. Nigeria only needs to press “save”.
