Part I: The Art of the Dribble
By Chris Agbedo
The footballing aphorism, “A legendary dribbler sometimes dribbles himself,” is often attributed to Pep Guardiola in describing the extraordinary, almost bewildering artistry of players such as Lionel Messi and Neymar. Guardiola captures that particular moment in football when brilliance begins to flirt with danger. Its wisdom lies in the paradox it captures: when footwork, creativity and tactical improvisation become exceptionally elaborate, the dribbler may occasionally outmanoeuvre not only the defender but himself. The genius that confounds the opposition can, through over-elaboration, produce its own moment of vulnerability. A gifted player receives the ball, beats one defender, then another, slips through a narrowing corridor and leaves the opposing side wondering where he will turn next. The crowd roars. Confidence rises. The player keeps dribbling. But football has a cruel little secret: the ability to beat defenders is not the same thing as the ability to control the momentum generated by beating them. The dribbler can eventually run out of space. He can collide with a teammate. He can lose the ball. Or, in the most ironic version of all, he can send it into his own net.
That is the political paradox now confronting President Bola Ahmed Tinubu: the master dribbler who has spent his political career outmanoeuvring opponents may be approaching the point where the momentum, complexity and consequences of his own game begin to dribble him. That is the political metaphor increasingly suggested by the strange and widening confrontation between President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s political machinery, the APC Governors’ Forum and Nyesom Wike’s Rainbow Coalition. Tinubu has established himself as one of Nigeria’s most formidable political tacticians. His political method has always contained a distinctive mixture of coalition-building, strategic recruitment, calculated defections and the ability to turn yesterday’s adversaries into today’s political associates. Since 2023, that machinery has produced an extraordinary political realignment. The opposition has suffered defections, internal crises and competing coalitions, while the APC has expanded its political reach. Presidential aides have openly described opposition figures as “internally displaced politicians,” a phrase used in 2025 to mock the opposition coalition’s leadership. The political mathematics seemed straightforward. Reduce the opposition. Expand the ruling coalition. Neutralise rival structures. Consolidate the political map. Enter 2027 from a position of overwhelming organisational advantage. It was, in its own way, a political dribbling masterclass.
Then came Wike, the man who would not disappear. The curious thing about Nyesom Wike is that he does not fit comfortably into the conventional categories of Nigerian opposition politics. He is a PDP chieftain. He is a federal minister in an APC-led administration. He openly supports President Tinubu’s bid for a second term. Yet, he insists that his support for Tinubu does not amount to support for the APC as a political party, nor does it require the PDP to surrender its right to contest governorship, National Assembly and State Assembly elections. His Rainbow Coalition, he says, is a cross-party mobilisation platform for Tinubu’s presidential bid. That distinction has now become the fault line.
The APC Governors’ Forum has declared that its members will not participate in or support any political arrangement capable of undermining Tinubu’s re-election, weakening the APC or adversely affecting APC candidates at any level. Wike’s answer was characteristically Wikean. The governors, he said, were “politically lazy” and “smart like the 419.” The language is theatrical, but the political argument beneath it is serious. Wike is essentially saying that presidential support and down-ballot party allegiance are not mutually exclusive. A voter can support one party’s presidential candidate and another party’s legislative candidate. A politician can support Tinubu without becoming an APC politician. A PDP member can mobilise for Tinubu while defending the PDP in other contests. And, most significantly, a political coalition can operate across party boundaries without becoming a formal APC structure. The APC governors see this as a parallel political structure. Wike sees it as political flexibility. The difference between those two descriptions is the difference between party control and coalition autonomy. And that is where the trouble begins.
*Enter Robert Greene*
Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power is useful here not because Nigerian politics should be reduced to a handbook of Machiavellian tricks, but because the book identifies something fundamental about power: power is relational, competitive and unstable. Greene presents the book as a study of the recurrent patterns of power across roughly three thousand years of history, drawing on figures and traditions ranging from Machiavelli and Sun Tzu to Clausewitz and modern political and cultural actors. Its central concern is control: how power is acquired, defended, exercised and lost. That makes the book relevant to the unfolding Nigerian political drama. The important question is not merely whether Tinubu has successfully accumulated political power. Clearly, he has. The more interesting question is: What happens to the distribution of power after a strategist has been extraordinarily successful at concentrating it? Because every political victory changes the political field. Every defection changes the balance. Every recruited politician acquires new leverage. Every weakened opposition creates new relationships within the ruling coalition. Every defeated adversary leaves behind interests, ambitions and political networks. The conquered does not necessarily disappear. Sometimes he migrates. Sometimes he adapts. Sometimes he becomes an ally. And sometimes the ally becomes an independent centre of power. That is the Wike conundrum.
*Law 31 and the politics of controlled choices*
Greene’s Law 31—”Control the Options”—offers an especially revealing lens. The logic is simple: the most effective strategist does not necessarily eliminate choice; he structures the available choices so that the other actor’s decision ultimately works within his strategic framework. That is a powerful description of political consolidation. Imagine the Nigerian opposition facing a narrowing strategic corridor: Defect to APC. Join a coalition. Remain fragmented. Lose relevance. The more successful the ruling party becomes at absorbing opposition politicians, the more the political environment appears to offer only one rational destination. But Wike’s Rainbow Coalition introduces another possibility: Support Tinubu without surrendering party identity. That is politically significant because it breaks the binary. It says that the choice need not be: APC or political extinction. There can be a third space: cross-party presidential support + independent subnational contests. Whether that strategy ultimately succeeds is a separate question. What matters analytically is that it complicates the architecture of political control. The strategist who has successfully narrowed the opponent’s choices suddenly discovers that one of the players has invented another choice. The board has changed.
*The instrument acquires agency*
This is where the alleged Tinubu-Wike arrangement becomes particularly fascinating. In December 2025, Governor Seyi Makinde alleged that Wike had told President Tinubu that he would “hold PDP” for him ahead of 2027. Wike subsequently denied the allegation as a “blatant lie” and denied that such a meeting or promise had occurred. That dispute must remain a dispute.
But the political phenomenon it points towards is undeniable enough to examine without deciding who is telling the truth. Suppose, hypothetically, that a politician remains within an opposition party while simultaneously helping the governing party weaken that opposition. What happens next? The politician acquires a peculiar form of leverage. He becomes useful precisely because he retains an independent base. But retaining that independent base means that he cannot easily be absorbed. The instrument of political fragmentation becomes an autonomous political actor. That is the paradox. You cannot simultaneously need someone’s independence and demand his obedience. And that is why Wike is such an uncomfortable political character for the APC establishment. He is useful because he is Wike. He is difficult because he is Wike.
*The Handle Within*
This brings us back to The Handle Within. The deepest vulnerability of a political structure is not always outside it. Sometimes it is the very mechanism through which the structure operates. The handle belongs to the door. It is not an enemy standing outside. It is part of the architecture. Yet, it determines how the door opens. The present Wike confrontation is beginning to look like politics discovering its own handle. The strategy of opposition fragmentation may have weakened the opposition. But it has also redistributed political influence across individuals and networks whose interests do not automatically coincide. That is the central paradox: the more successful the consolidation, the more consequential the disagreements within the consolidated camp become. A fractured opposition can be politically weak. But a powerful governing coalition containing multiple ambitious actors can become internally combustible. That is not necessarily a prediction of collapse. It is a structural observation. And Greene’s Law 47 makes the observation even sharper.
*The danger of going past the mark*
Greene’s Law 47 is perhaps the most important of all for this editorial: do not go past the mark you aimed for; in victory, learn when to stop. The danger, in Greene’s formulation, is that success can produce overconfidence. The strategist achieves the original objective and then continues making moves because victory has created an appetite for further domination. That is where strategy can become self-defeating. If the original objective is electoral victory, why must every opposition structure be annihilated? If the objective is securing a presidential mandate, why must every subnational contest become an extension of the presidential contest? If the objective is building a governing coalition, why must every coalition partner surrender his own political identity? Those questions now hover over the APC-Wike confrontation. Wike’s position is essentially that supporting Tinubu does not mean surrendering every other political contest to APC candidates. The APC governors’ position is that a parallel coalition could weaken the party and its candidates. Both positions reveal the same underlying fact: the presidential coalition and the party coalition are no longer perfectly coterminous. And that is where the legendary dribbler enters dangerous territory. The more defenders he beats, the more open field he appears to have.
But the more open field he has, the more momentum he generates. And momentum has no political loyalty. It simply carries the game forward. That is the beginning of the own-goal problem. The question is no longer whether Tinubu can dribble the opposition. The question is whether he can control the momentum created by his own dribbling.
*The game begins to dribble the dribbler*
There is a strange irony in political mastery. The strategist, who becomes extraordinarily good at controlling other people’s moves can eventually create a political environment in which everyone begins calculating how to control him. That is the paradox of power. And that is where Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power becomes less a handbook of conquest than a warning about conquest.
Greene’s laws are often read as instructions for winning the game. Read more deeply, however, they reveal the instability of the game itself. Every act of domination alters the incentives of everyone else. The strategist makes a move. Others respond. The response changes the field. The strategist makes another move. The field changes again. Eventually, the strategist may discover that he is no longer merely playing the game. He is playing against the consequences of the game he created. That is the political meaning of The Handle Within. And that is why the Wike-Rainbow Coalition confrontation matters beyond Wike. The Coalition exposes the limits of political absorption. He supports Tinubu without surrendering his PDP identity or political autonomy, while APC governors demand alignment with the party’s electoral interests. The dispute has therefore transcended personalities: it now concerns who controls Tinubu’s coalition and whether presidential support necessarily requires party allegiance.
