By dusk this past Sunday, it was all over the media that Lt. Ahmed Yerima, the same Naval officer that denied FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, access to a piece of estate owned by a retired Chief of Naval Staff, Zubairu Gambo, had escaped an assassination attempt. There was something unsettling about the report because of the gross imputation it raised about  his encounter with Wike and the negative air of celebrity it attracted to him. There was nothing spontaneous about that clash. Real as it was, it was but staged for the cameras.  Wike, with siren-blaring outriders, rode in like a conqueror. What Nigerians have praised as the professionalism of the officer, his firm, and supposed respectful  handling of Wike in the face of obvious provocation, was for the cameras. 

He knew he was being recorded and had to be on his best behaviour. And with the consciousness that he had the full support of those who deployed him on the proverbial slave’s errand, he knew he had to deliver it with the decorum of a freeborn. Otherwise, Wike and his cohort would have been brutalised, beaten black and blue as the soldiers from Abalti Barracks , Ojuelegba, did Fela in February 1977 when they burned down his self-named Kalakuta Republic. Or as men of the Nigerian Air Force in Ikeja did MKO Abiola and some of his family members who were harassed in the infamous incident with those their boss, Air Vice Marshal Nureen Imam, would later describe as mad dogs. There were no phone cameras to report that encounter except the words of a family and its traumatised patriarch. 

Five years after that ingloriously memorable encounter, Abiola would win an election that the military ensured was annulled. The battle to reclaim his stolen mandate would precipitate a series of events that would culminate in his death on July 7, 1998. Which is another way of saying that the Nigerian military, symbolised by Air Vice Marshal’s Nureen’s mad dogs, were Abiola’s nemesis that could also have been guilty of murdering their own Commander-in-Chief had Abiola been elected a few years earlier. So, all that blather about Wike’s behaviour amounting to gross disrespect of President Bola Tinubu as the Commander-in-Chief and the demand that he be sacked or redeployed, are simply a demand for the continuation of a culture of impunity that allowed the military to create a hierarchy of seniority that affirmed their exceptionalism by placing the military at the very top, allowing them to disrespect not only  civil authorities but other uniformed officers of the Nigerian state. 

This or Lt. Yerima would not, while claiming he had integrity and the right to speak in the face of Wike’s verbal assault, talk down at a police officer who he said was not in the position to address a military man like him. For these military officers who say their uniforms are symbols of state power and sovereignty, the uniforms of paramilitary agencies like the Police, the Customs, Immigration and the Civil Defence Corps, either do not count or count for less compared to those of the military. It’s in that spirit that operatives of the Nigerian Army refuse to obey officers of the paramilitary agencies in the line of duty, have beaten up police officers and sacked police stations and barracks as they did at Ojuelegba in Lagos in October 2005. Within the military, Army officers see themselves as the queens of the armed forces, while the Air Force and the Navy ‘drag’ seniority. For both the military and paramilitary forces, especially the former, other Nigerians are ‘bloody civilians’. Lt. Yerima, therefore, did nothing spectacular in his feigned respect of Wike, a pugnacious and mostly unlikeable (except to his family and close associates) but relatively effective public officer. 

His reprehensible reputation is the reason many refused to see the merit of his position in his clash with Yerima and the forces he represented. He is an officer of the Nigerian state executing the powers of the president as the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory and custodian of all landed property in the FCT. He has been accused of brutal exercise of his powers as FCT Minister, ignoring court orders and grabbing state land on behalf of his family, friends and associates. It’s reasonable to assume that some, if not many of these allegations, are untrue especially as they are not substantiated. But they are easy to believe because of the kind of person Wike is. It’s either his way or the highway. He was always like this and didn’t become so since or because he joined Tinubu’s cabinet. He lacks nuance and is a bulldozer before whom every object is a hill that must be levelled. Either as governor, minister or a politician at any of the levels in which he has functioned, he has played the part either of an enforcer or an obstructor. It was in that mood he stopped the arrest of judges accused of corruption in 2019. 

As an enforcer he has ordered the demolition of the properties of individuals and groups suspected of breaching housing or urban planning laws. That was what took him to the property of the retired Chief of Naval Staff who as a civilian has no right to deploy his personal details in the manner it happened. What happened could only have been at the behest of officers or an officer still in active service. It was a misuse of state power and resources against duly constituted authorities. Yerima might have only obeyed orders but he is culpable for obeying an unlawful order. The optics are even more damning for him as a naval officer who should be operating on a sea-faring armed vessel, safeguarding the country’s territorial integrity, not the assumed integrity of misapplied courage. 

That was not the occasion to display bravery, acting as the Mai Gadi of an unoccupied space. It was a shame. There is nothing brave about Yerima’s behaviour. He was just being a regular soldier with a bloated ego and the Dutch courage of a wife beater. He is supposed to be a warrior-sailor, not a landlubber as the Pirates (NAS) would have called him. He sure fancies himself as a celebrity. A sheer waste of tax payers money. He should not aspire to be a General who is only brave in encounters with unarmed civilians. His counterparts elsewhere earn their stripes as Seals, elite corps of the best warriors trained to execute the most dangerous missions, not as bag carriers idly gallivanting across a landlocked national capital in cars with numbers concealed and glasses tinted, only to conjure tall tales of assassinations on being called out by police officers on legitimate duties.