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Wike is saying the quiet part out loud. Also, the courts have told INEC to fix up before 2027; ASUU is fed up with the government, and APC’s primary election results are raising eyebrows.
Good morning, Big Brains. Now that my exams are over, I’m building up and preparing for my project defence. The time when I finally graduate is getting closer and closer, and I can’t wait. Let’s get into it.
- Orame
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In the madhouse that is Nigeria, many things go down within the week, and it can be difficult to grasp them all. This edition of The Big Daily newsletter cuts through the noise and sifts through the debris to bring you the four biggest news stories that shaped the week.
Let’s get into this week’s Big-4:
Wike said he had already decided the fate of Rivers’ politics
INEC got caught bending the rules
ASUU is tired of the government’s B.S
The results from the APC’s primaries are raising eyebrows
Wike said he had already decided the fate of Rivers’ politics
In any other place, Nyesom Wike would be a lawyer’s nightmare with his media and publicity team in perpetual fear, but the universe is kind because of all the countries where he could have been a politician; Wike landed in Nigeria, where you can get away with anything.
On Monday, May 25, while speaking to journalists, the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, Nyesom Wike, confirmed that Rivers State Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, withdrew from the All Progressive Congress (APC) governorship primary due to a deal they both had..
Wike explained that Fubara had agreed, as part of a peace deal arranged in Abuja, to give up his chance to run for re-election. In return, the state legislature, which was pushing for his impeachment, would back off.
“I wasn’t surprised because, in the first place, he ought not to have collected the form; this is because agreement was reached that his impeachment should be dropped, while he should also not go for a second term,” Wike told reporters.
President Bola Tinubu, who had declared a state of emergency in Rivers State in March 2025 and suspended Fubara for six months, apparently presided over the terms of this arrangement. This makes you wonder whether that suspension was due to sincere concern about the state or a power play.
The Fubara-Wike conflict began in 2023, after Fubara fell out with Wike, his predecessor and political godfather. What followed was a prolonged crisis that ultimately ended in an illegal suspension and a state of emergency declaration. The crisis was eventually “resolved,” and Fubara was reinstated in September 2025. Now, we know what that resolution actually costs.
Unfortunately, Fubara’s case is not unique. In 2006, Oyo State Governor Rashidi Ladoja was impeached after falling out with political godfather Lamidi Adedibu over government appointments.
In Anambra, Chris Uba mobilised the state assembly to impeach Governor Chris Ngige because he refused to share state resources as agreed before the election.
On November 2, 2006, Peter Obi was also impeached by an assembly speaker for “gross misconduct”. The Buhari Presidency would confirm 11 years later that the impeachment was initiated because he refused to inflate the state budget to “settle” political godfathers. The lawmakers reportedly met with the President's representatives in Asaba before being escorted to Awka by a mobile police unit to finish the job. Obi went to court, won, and completed his tenure.
The details change; the logic does not. A governor is elected, a godfather feels owed, the assembly becomes a weapon, and he gets what he wants, even if it destroys the state.
This is the operating logic of Nigerian governance, where political sustenance is not negotiated through elections but through settlements, where a sitting governor’s second-term bid becomes a bargaining chip in a dispute between a few men. What is new in Rivers is that the fixer is admitting it out loud.
The implication is that Rivers voters never got a say in whether their governor should run again. That right was traded away in an Abuja meeting.
For Rivers voters, this means a government they elected has been managing a course they had no knowledge of, let alone a vote on. This should alarm every Nigerian, because the logic applies across states. If a governor’s second-term ambition can be traded in a peace deal brokered by the president, what else can be traded? What other mandates have been mortgaged in rooms we’ll never see?
Nigerians deserve representatives who answer to voters, not pawns who answer to godfathers. The first step is refusing to pretend that what Wike described is normal, because it isn’t.
INEC got caught bending the rules
If there is one institution that can’t afford to give Nigerians more reasons to distrust it, it’s the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). But it doesn’t seem clear to them. Recently, the court ruled against INEC for attempting to shorten the timeline in its updated 2027 election timetable.
In the first case, filed by the Youth Party, Justice M. G. Umar ruled on May 20 that INEC had wrongly compressed the 120-day window to a 100-day one for political parties to submit candidates’ particulars. Under Section 29(1) of the Electoral Act, 2026, political parties are to submit the list and personal details of the candidates chosen from valid primaries, not later than 120 days before the date appointed for a general election to INEC.
The court invalidated the parts of the timetable that violated the law, including those related to primaries, candidate submissions, withdrawals, replacements, final candidate lists, and campaign duration. INEC didn’t like the judgment, so it filed an appeal on May 25 and simultaneously requested that the order be put on hold.
In a separate suit filed by the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Justice J.K. Omotosho ruled on May 26 that while the court affirms INEC’s general authority to issue timetables, its deadlines don’t follow the law. The court also ordered INEC to amend its timetable to comply with both Sections 29(1) and 31 of the Act.
On March 27, 2026, INEC set August 29 and September 16 as deadlines for political parties to submit the details of the candidates they’ll field for different positions in the 2027 general elections. But section 29(1) of the Electoral Act says it’s ok for parties to do this no later than 120 days before the election, meaning INEC’s self-imposed dates did not comply with this law. Why INEC decided to compress this into 100 days is what we’ll never understand.
INEC insists it set that deadline because the constitution empowers it to issue and alter election timetables. This is largely true, but what INEC cannot do is use that power to reduce timelines already stamped by the law.
Electoral timelines exist to ensure that the playing ground is equal for all political parties. Whether INEC’s deadlines were a deliberate power play or genuine incompetence, the effect is the same and poses a structural advantage for the ruling party.
The thing is, INEC, more than any other institution, does not have the luxury of making mistakes or appearing to take sides, seeing as it was already operating under a cloud of suspicion. Earlier this year, the commission’s chairman faced serious allegations of partisanship after his old pro-APC post resurfaced on X. INEC’s decision to appeal rather than simply comply with two court rulings does nothing to reassure an already sceptical public.
Nigerians have a duty to monitor every adjustment INEC makes to the 2027 timetable. The opposition’s ability to mount a credible challenge depends on those deadlines remaining legally sound.
ASUU is tired of the government’s B.S
Nigeria has what we’d like to call a ritual dance. The federal government and Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) fight, students suffer, courts intervene, a deal is signed, and within months, the cycle repeats itself. Every administration, regardless of party lines, engages in this dance, and Tinubu’s is not an exception to this rule.
On March 31 2026, the Minister of Education, Tunji Alausa, declared that the era of university strikes in Nigeria was “permanently over.” This came after the federal government signed a renegotiated agreement with ASUU on January 14, following negotiations concluded in December 2025. The agreement covered Earned Academic Allowances (EAA), Consolidated Academic Tool Allowances (CATA), Professorial Allowances, salary increments, and promotion arrears. ASUU’s national president, Chris Piwuna, is now telling a different story.
On Wednesday, May 22, Piwuna told TheCable the EAA has now gone unpaid for 18 months. An Implementation Monitoring Committee was supposed to ensure compliance with the January agreement, but according to the ASUU Zonal Coordinator, Abubakar Sabo, they were never even inaugurated.
Several universities have not implemented the agreed 40% salary increment. Salary payment delays have been reported across federal universities since February. The federal government says the unpaid salaries will be cleared once the new finance minister settles down, but Piwuna is not falling for that obvious excuse. We are tired of your tactics. We are fed up,” he said.
ASUU has taken strike actions over unimplemented agreements since 1988. As a result of these strikes, Nigerian students lost a cumulative three years of academic time between 1999 and 2020 alone, way before Tinubu came into power. The eight-month 2022 strike, the longest in Nigerian history, ended only after a court order, and the agreement reached then also went substantially unimplemented.
You’d expect that Tinubu, who has made “master strategist” his entire identity, would whip up a solution, but here we are.
Nigerian public university students already contend with some of the most underfunded, overcrowded tertiary institutions around. An academic calendar that isn’t predictable every few years on account of a promise the government made and broke is a result of the government’s neglect.
The government should immediately inaugurate the Implementation Monitoring Committee it committed to, pay the outstanding EAA, and stop using ministerial transitions as an excuse to pause obligations it freely signed.
The results from the APC’s primaries are raising eyebrows
On Saturday, May 23, the APC held its presidential primary elections, and President Bola Tinubu won. There are no surprises there. What’s surprising, though, is the number by which he won.
According to the Chairman of the APC Presidential Primary Election Committee, Senator Pius Anyim, Tinubu polled 10.99 million votes across 8,000 wards nationwide. His only challenger, businessman Stanley Osifo, received 16,503 votes. The party’s National Chairman, Nentawe Yilwatda, called the exercise “a dress rehearsal” for victory in the 2027 general election.
The problem with that framing is what happens when you put that number next to the 8.7 million votes which Tinubu received in the actual 2023 presidential election. Tinubu, running against multiple opponents with nationwide campaigns, received 8.7 million votes nationwide. He now apparently got 10.99 million votes from members of his own party.
Yilwatda explains these numbers by saying APC now has a verified membership register of 12.6 million, and that an 85% turnout among those members is possible. He said that the 2023 membership figures had “glitches” in the online registration process. What he has not explained is how a political candidate in an internal party primary can achieve a higher vote count than he did in a national election.
General elections draw from the entire registered voter population, while primaries are limited to party members. Even in the United States, where presidential primaries generate massive turnout, primary votes are almost always a fraction of general election totals.
If the numbers from this primary are accurate, they suggest Tinubu enters 2027 with a base that has grown since 2023 and that the APC machinery is operational. But if the numbers are inflated and the gap between this primary result and the 2023 general election figure isn’t real, then this exercise is something more troubling: a demonstration of how a party can manufacture numbers and, by extension, a preview of what it might attempt to manufacture in a general election.
Inflated primary numbers create a false sense of the incumbent’s real strength, distort the opposition’s threat assessment, and normalise the kind of result-fabrication that has historically defined disputed Nigerian elections.
Get your Permanent Voter Card (PVC), confirm your polling unit, and show up at the elections to make the manufacturing cost as high as possible.
Your Next Big Read
→ West Africa CivicTech Conference 2026: On July 24, 2026, innovators, journalists, policymakers, and citizens who believe technology can fix governance are coming together at the Civic Centre in Lagos. The theme is: Youth, technology, and the future of governance in West Africa”. If that sounds like something you’re interested in, you have to be there!
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The Big Picks
INEC appeals ruling voiding primaries and registration deadlines: INEC has now appealed the Youth Party court judgment and filed for a stay of execution — meaning the commission wants to keep its voided timetable in place while it fights the ruling.
Disputes trail presidential primaries as parties pick 2027 candidates: It wasn’t just APC — multiple parties have held primaries this week, and several have already attracted allegations of manipulation and parallel congresses.
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