Nyesom Wike, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister, has an uncanny ability to stay on the right side of the law in nearly all his litigations within and against the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Unlike his opponents in the party, many of whom are not lawyers, his law education appears to confer some advantages on him. On January 30, a Federal High Court sitting in Ibadan voided the party’s November 15-16, 2025 national convention held in Ibadan. In the judgement, Justice Uche Agomoh held that last year’s convention was conducted in disobedience to two court orders, insisting that factional national chairman Tanimu Turaki’s effort to secure legitimacy for both the convention and the executives produced by the convention was an exercise in futility. Justice Agomoh was of course referring to the October 31, 2025 decision by Justice James Omotosho of the Federal High Court in Abuja halting the convention, and the November 14, 2025 decision by Justice Peter Lifu ordering the suspension of the convention in a case brought by former Jigawa State governor Sule Lamido complaining against exclusion.
The Seyi Makinde-led PDP inanely conducted the convention citing a November 4, 2025 ex-parte order issued by an Oyo State High Court sitting in Ibadan and presided over by Justice Ladiran Akintola. By early November, the dispute over the convention had virtually resolved itself through the two Federal High Court judgements, but the Makinde faction had spent too much to make a U-turn of fail to clutch at a straw by procuring the ex-parte order. But responding to the faction’s adamantine resolve to hold the convention, Mr Wike had sarcastically retorted that the intransigent party members were on a jamboree. The former Rivers governor, it turned out, was right, regardless of the causticity of his remarks. While the Makinde faction still continues to talk tough, Mr Turaki has sensibly headed to the Court of Appeal to see whether his faction could secure legitimacy. He won’t get his wish. Mr Wike, like him or hate his guts, has woven a tight web around the legal neophytes of the Makinde faction, so tight they can’t even wriggle. They are already suffocating, in contrast to the tough jurisprudential talk by the Forum of PDP chairmen who assert their determination to forge ahead notwithstanding court judgements.
Last Thursday, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) rubbed it in on the Makinde faction by proceeding to recognise the Wike faction. At the quarterly meeting between the Commission and leaders of political parties, Caretaker Chairman Abdulrahman Mohammed and Caretaker National Secretary Samuel Anyanwu, both of the Wike faction, were invited. Shutting out the Makinde faction executives may not sound the death knell to their leadership of the party, especially considering that they had lodged an appeal, but legal experts are not optimistic about a reversal of fortune for them. Leading PDP chieftains anticipated this conundrum long before the November 2025 dates for the convention were fixed. All warnings, however, fell on deaf ears. Now, with the neutering of the convention and the enthronement of the Wike faction in the PDP saddle, estranged PDP leaders will either have to swallow their pride and begin to deal and negotiate with Mr Wike or abandon the party altogether. It is not certain what kind of suicide they might opt for.
What is beyond controversy, however, is that because of his legal fleetness, Mr Wike has regained a party that former vice president Atiku Abubakar and his cohorts tried to snatch, after first leaving it for dead in 2019. To regain control of the opposition party, the FCT minister had played his politics right by declining to defect to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) that made him a minister, staying the course knowing full well that Alhaji Atiku and his crowd were feckless and inattentive, and lending the party character, style and purpose. Party chieftains like Bode George may find Mr Wike somewhat objectionable, and former senate president and Kwara governor Bukola Saraki may be unnerved by the FCT minister’s mannerisms; but both of them, and perhaps many more, recognise that Mr Wike’s doggedness, combativeness, and charisma were best suited to help the party survive the blitz that swept over it in the past few years.
Many times this column had advised the PDP to rebuild and reform and prepare itself for the 2031 polls, but the urgency of regaining power in the short run had always transcended the sensibleness of reclaiming its leading position in the medium to long run. It was that urgency, plus the indecipherable desire of Mr Makinde to run for the presidency in 2027, that led to the serial blunders of the past few months. Mr Wike, despite his flaws, not to talk of the collapse of his ambition in the 2023 elections, suspected that getting the PDP to root for 2027 was a far-fetched proposition. He had labored to stay in the PDP against his better judgement when Alhaji Atiku took the presidential ticket, but once the chance of a southerner winning the presidency arose in late 2022 and early 2023, his instincts led him to offer support to another candidate across party divides. He seems to believe that abandoning the self-sustaining logic that took a southerner to the presidency would be fatal to everything he stands for. If he appears to treacherously keep the PDP in subjection, it is less because he loathed his party than because he senses that it would be dangerous to fiddle with the logic that propelled Bola Tinubu to the presidency.
In the months ahead, Mr Wike will continue to bask in the legal euphoria his court victory has rightly gifted his faction. His faction will win over many state chairmen who had backed the Makinde faction because they initially thought it was impossible for the pendulum to swing in any other direction. The Wike faction has set a timetable for the PDP national convention; it will follow it scrupulously, probably with a few amendments. They know it is inconceivable for the courts to backpedal, and they know that even if the other stray PDP faithful were to return home, they would be incapable or agile enough to upset the Wike apple cart. The Wike faction will consequently produce the next PDP executives. But whether the executives and party members will be united enough to queue behind his ginger straddle on the national scene or not is hard to fathom.
For the many elected lawmakers and the few governors left in the party, some of whom are too galled by the politics of desperation of Alhaji Atiku’s African Democratic Congress (ADC), it will be a relief to finally reclaim the PDP, get their election forms properly and legally signed, and compete for offices, particularly at the lower levels.
The survival of the PDP is not really in doubt. It will bounce back after 2027, and will probably give a good account of itself before and during the 2031 elections. If Mr Wike survives the Rivers scare personified by the flighty Siminalayi Fubara, and if he continues to play his politics calculatingly and with less agitation and hysteria, he will not only hold on to Rivers, he will continue to find significant relevance in the Tinubu cabinet, where he is a performer, and will ultimately offer PDP the leadership it badly desires in the years ahead.
While he is growing into a fairly endowed political tactician, his triumphs have so far seemed entirely fortuitous. To hone his political skills, and to continue to matter in the PDP in Rivers and nationally, he will have to eschew the impulsiveness and naivety that propel his choices, whether of succession at the state and party levels or his options at the national level. He has successfully encircled his remaining enemies in the PDP, after first indirectly getting rid of his more unappeasable foes. If his image is not to be sullied, and if his influence is to last for as long as he dreams, he must now find value in making more friends than enemies, being less brash and imperious, and developing the immense capacity to tolerate dissenters as much as his brittle image can sustain. But in all, Mr Wike has so much to be grateful for, for no politician in these parts and in recent years has so consummately run with the hare and hunted with the hounds.
Culled from The Nation
