Public altercations involving state officials are rarely ever about the individuals directly involved; they are symbolic episodes that reveal deeper institutional tensions, cultural patterns, and psychological dynamics within the polity. In the analysis of such episodes, sobriety, balance, and scholarly restraint are indispensable. As sociolinguists remind us, language in public life does not merely communicate; it performs, indexes power, constructs identities, and shapes public perception. The confrontation in Abuja between the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, and a young Naval officer, Lieutenant Yerima, offers a rare window into the fault lines between civilian authority and military assertion, between institutional protocol and individual temperament, and between the lingering shadows of military rule and the demands of a maturing democracy. A balanced analysis demands that neither actor be demonised nor canonised. Both erred – but in different ways and at different levels of responsibility. And both raise critical questions about how power is exercised, contested, and disciplined in Nigeria.
The altercation did not arise in a vacuum. Abuja’s land administration has long been a fertile ground for conflict – between ministries, security agencies, political elites, and private claimants. The land in question is reported to be under dispute, with the involvement of a retired Naval chief who allegedly instructed military personnel to “protect” the site. This alone raises the first legitimate question: Did the Naval officer have the authority to enforce land claims without documentary proof? The answer, unless there is proof to the contrary, – legally and institutionally – is no. No military officer, active or retired, has jurisdiction to secure or assert ownership over civilian land without: valid title documents, the involvement of the FCT authorities, and adherence to the laid-down processes of land allocation and reclamation. In this respect, Wike, as Minister, was fully within his lawful remit to inspect the land, demand documentation, and challenge any attempt by unauthorized personnel to obstruct the process. The Land Use Act, which vests the powers and responsibility for the allocation and management of land within such a State on the Governor or in this context, the FCT Minister, empowers Mr. Wike to assert jurisdiction over land matter within the FCT. Therefore, his insistence on “Show me the document” was procedurally correct, institutionally justified, and in line with the responsibilities of his office.
On the flip side, let’s pause to consider the aspect of institutional overreach, where the naval officer erred unless otherwise proved. A commissioned officer, regardless of sincerity, cannot enforce land claims based on orders from a retired superior, especially when such orders contradict lawful civilian procedures. The attempt by Lt. Yerima, emboldened by ‘orders from the above’ to assert jurisdiction and forcibly intervene in a land dispute within the jurisdiction of FCT is unlawful and an abuse of power. Perhaps, one can safely attribute this aberration to military habitus and the legacy of overweening authority. Nigeria’s prolonged military rule has cultivated in some security actors an instinctive sense of superiority, entitlement, and prerogative in civil matters. Lieutenant Yerima’s firm insistence – “We are acting on orders” – reflects a deep-seated military habitus that privileges hierarchy over legality. This is not a personal flaw but a structural inheritance. While Yerima remained largely polite, his repeated insistence on “acting on orders” without evidence inadvertently escalated tensions. In a contested environment, tone and pragmatics matter. A more diplomatic approach, especially before a senior public official, might have de-escalated matters.
Wike was conducting an official inspection on disputed land. His challenge to Yerima’s presence and demand for documents was not only appropriate but necessary. A minister must assert civilian oversight, especially against tendencies, however well-intended, that reflect military intrusion into civil administration. If indeed the officer refused initial instructions or attempted to obstruct the team, Wike was justified in insisting that soldiers cannot intimidate government functionaries. These are major points in Wike’s favour, which a balanced editorial must acknowledge. Nonetheless, the downside of the encounter was Wike’s verbal meltdown. If his institutional standing was strong, his linguistic performance was weak, deeply, regrettably weak.
“Shut up your mouth!”
“I will not shut my mouth.”
“You are a big fool!”
“I am not a fool.”
“When I was in school you had not even resumed school…”
These utterances fall under what pragmatists classify as face-threatening acts – not simply informal expressions of annoyance, but deliberate acts that assault the interlocutor’s social face, his identity, institutional dignity, and personal self-respect.
At this point, let’s consider the psychological, philosophical, and sociological implications of the Wike-Yerima donnybrook. Wike’s eruption bears the markings of triggered-anger syndrome, a behavioural pattern in which high-power individuals lash out when their authority feels threatened. Three psychological mechanisms are central: ego-defensiveness, status anxiety, emotional dysregulation. The perceived challenge from a younger, uniformed subordinate activates a reflexive need to reassert dominance. Even powerful actors exhibit insecurity when institutional hierarchies overlap—here, political authority vs. military authority. The speed and intensity of the outburst suggest impaired impulse control under stress, common among leaders juggling high public expectations. Yerima’s insistence -“I have integrity… I am acting on instructions” – also reflects role-identity rigidity, i.e., military conditioning that privileges obedience to command over civilian sensitivity. His stance, while professional, can appear confrontational in volatile civil spaces.
Philosophically, the confrontation raises deeper questions of virtue, ethical conduct, and the moral obligations of public office – Aristotelian temperance, Kantian respect for persons, the ethics of office. Leadership demands measured response; rage is a vice that corrodes moral authority. Wike momentarily forfeited the virtue that legitimises public power. To call a commissioned officer “a big fool” violates the categorical imperative to treat individuals, especially agents of state sovereignty, as ends in themselves. Holding public office imposes a higher moral discipline. The question is not whether Wike had power, but whether he exercised it with the civility and restraint befitting a minister. From this perspective, the spectacle illustrates how power without self-mastery becomes self-discrediting.
At the sociological level, the incident reveals embedded structural tensions between Nigeria’s civil and military institutions, reflecting residue of militarism, elite impunity, and symbolic politics. Decades of military rule have normalised a culture where officers feel entitled to intervene in civil matters, sometimes without due legal process. Yerima’s presence on disputed land without on-site documentation reflects this institutional overreach. On the other hand, Wike’s verbal excess is symptomatic of Nigeria’s political class, where confrontation often supersedes dialogue. Such conduct reinforces a culture of power-as-performance rather than power-as-service. All the same, uniforms, titles, and offices carry symbolic sovereignty. An attack on a uniformed officer is perceived not merely as personal abuse but an affront to the state’s institutional order. Sociologically, the clash embodies Nigeria’s unfinished transition from militarised command culture to mature democratic civility.)
Wike’s follow-up remarks -“I didn’t call the military a fool… What I meant is he was carrying out an illegal order” – fit neatly into what psychologists and discourse analysts call the non-apology apology, or what rhetoricians frame as a strategic denial. A non-apology apology is a rhetorical manoeuvre that mimics the form of regret while avoiding the substance of responsibility. It is characterised by deflection (shifting attention to misunderstanding rather than wrongful conduct (“I didn’t say the military is a fool”); reframing (recasting the offensive behaviour as justified or misconstrued (“What I meant was something else”); self-exoneration (maintaining innocence while appearing gracious or conciliatory. In political communication, it is designed to look like contrition without yielding the moral ground implied by true accountability. In elite circles, this technique is often labelled a “smart apology” – a strategic linguistic compromise that seeks to contain public backlash; avoid admissions that could have legal or institutional consequences; appease multiple audiences simultaneously; preserve the speaker’s face, status, or political capital. However, this “smartness” is superficial; it is public relations smart, not ethically smart. It communicates tactical savvy, not moral courage.
Wike’s denial does not engage with the central grievance – his dehumanising public humiliation of a commissioned officer. Instead, the denial focuses on what he did not say, rather than what he actually did – attack a uniformed officer’s integrity and personhood. A genuine apology would acknowledge – excessive emotional escalation, abuse of official power in tone and manner, the symbolic insult to the Nigerian Armed Forces as an institution, and the social and political weight of his words. Instead, his response sidesteps accountability and shifts the conversation to a linguistic technicality. From a discourse-ethical standpoint, such ‘apologies’ undermine trust, because they signal avoidance, not responsibility; reinforce impunity, especially among political elites accustomed to unchecked power; inflame public cynicism, as citizens read them as manipulative performances; erode institutional respect, because they trivialise the moral obligations of high office.
By choosing a strategic non-apology, Wike lost the rare opportunity to model virtuous leadership – marked by humility, self-restraint, and moral clarity. In the Aristotelian sense, he retreated not only from responsibility but also from temperance, the virtue that gives authority both dignity and legitimacy.
At the heart of the Abuja confrontation lies a deeper institutional puzzle, one that transcends personalities and probes the structural health of Nigeria’s civil–military relations. The critical question is straightforward: Can a retired naval chief lawfully deploy or instruct serving officers to intervene in a civilian land dispute? The unequivocal answer is no. Military personnel are not land administrators; they do not allocate plots; they do not enforce private property claims. Their constitutional mandate remains strictly bounded within defence, national security, and internal stability—never private land encroachment. That an active-duty officer could appear on site, fully uniformed, in the service of a land claim allegedly linked to a retired superior raises troubling institutional red flags. It suggests the possibility of military privilege bleeding into civilian terrain, a phenomenon traceable to the long shadow of military rule – those decades when soldiers arbitrated civil matters by fiat and uniform alone conferred unquestioned authority. In a democratic dispensation, such encroachment is not merely inappropriate; it is institutionally dangerous.
Several unsettling possibilities emerge: institutional misguidance, abuse of residual influence and post-service military entitlement, civilian oversight undermined, security-administrative confusion. Ultimately, the institutional question illuminates this piece’s broader thrust – the Abuja incident is not merely a clash of tempers but a clash of institutional boundaries. The controversy reveals how fragile Nigeria’s civil-military equilibrium remains, how easily the spectre of military overreach resurfaces, and how urgently democratic norms must be fortified. A mature democracy must demand more than emotional restraint from its public officials; it must demand institutional discipline from all arms of government. Until boundaries are respected and the uniform is insulated from private interests, Nigeria risks sliding into a hybrid order where formal democracy coexists uneasily with informal militarised influence. This is the deeper danger behind the Wike-Yerima episode – and the national conversation it must now force upon us.
This episode offers a guarded advisory about the clash of two dangerous human impulses – the military’s historical instinct to assert authority and the politician’s perilous temptation to weaponize power through invective. Both are problematic. Both must be disciplined. What is required moving forward? They include but not limited to a formal reaffirmation of military subordination to civil land authorities; a clear apology from the Minister for his verbal indiscretion; a rebuke – though not punishment – of the Naval officer for procedural overreach; civic education on inter-agency boundaries; a cultural shift toward respectful dialogue in governance. Balance means acknowledging that Wike was right institutionally, wrong verbally; Yerima was wrong institutionally, right in composure – but still failed in procedural respect for civil authorities; the retired Naval chief, if involved, bears primary responsibility for misleading a junior officer. The broader lesson is that Nigeria’s democracy matures not by condemning individuals but by interrogating the structures, cultures, and historical residues that shape their behaviour. A constructive discourse requires both censure and understanding, both criticism and compassion.
In the end, the Wike-Yerima incident is more than a spat between a minister and a junior officer. It is about how Nigeria negotiates power, civility, and institutional respect in a fragile democracy still haunted by its past. It is a microcosm of a national malaise – a country where the temperature of public dialogue remains perpetually too high, and where authority is too often asserted through volume rather than reason. Wike’s intemperate language and Yerima’s institutional overreach are not isolated missteps but symptomatic echoes of a nation still oscillating between the authoritarian reflexes of its past and the democratic civility it desperately seeks to consolidate. Nigeria cannot continue to transact its public disagreements with the grammar of anger, the vocabulary of intimidation, or the lexicon of institutional bravado. A democracy without disciplined speech is a democracy forever at the edge of self-sabotage.
The real task before us, therefore, is not merely to apportion blame but to demand a higher standard of conduct from all custodians of state authority – civilian and military alike. For where power is not tempered by restraint, and where authority is not disciplined by law, governance degenerates into theatre, and institutions lose their moral prestige. Civil discourse is not ornamental; it is infrastructural. It is the oxygen that keeps democratic institutions breathing. When leaders speak with restraint, citizens learn to debate without violence; when public officials disagree without denigrating one another, they legitimise the civic space; and when those in uniform and those in political office converse with mutual respect, the state itself becomes more coherent, more stable, and more worthy of public trust.
The lesson is therefore clear Nigeria cannot renew its democracy without renewing its speech ethics. We need a civic culture where disagreement is not war, where authority does not bark, where uniform does not bully, and where titles do not intoxicate. We need a political environment in which constitutional power is exercised with calm deliberation, not theatrical indignation; where grievances are ventilated without humiliating one’s fellow citizens; and where leaders model the decorum that the society they govern desperately needs. If Nigeria is to move from perpetual tension to constructive engagement, the country must elevate the tone of its public conversations. The true measure of leadership is not how loudly one shouts but how wisely one speaks. And the true test of citizenship is not blind obedience or belligerent posturing, but the capacity to sustain disagreement without destroying the dignity of the nation we all claim to serve. Nigeria must rise above such theatrics. A democracy that cannot govern its speech cannot govern its space. Until we cultivate a national habit of disciplined speech, Nigeria will remain trapped in the theatre of needless confrontations. But when we finally choose civility over bluster, dialogue over intimidation, and respect over rage, we will discover that the most powerful tool in nation-building is not coercion but conversation.
