Farooq Kperogi, a Nigerian-American academic and public affairs commentator, has offered his opinions on the recent altercation between Lieutenant A.M. Yerima and Nyesom Wike, the minister of the Federal Capital Territory, characterizing it as a moment of courage and self-control.

According to Kperogi’s view, the altercation represented a conflict between principle and power, analogous to a conflict between an immovable object and an irresistible force.

Kperogi regarding Yerima’s composed manner
He noted that Wike’s characteristic hostility contrasted sharply with Yerima’s cool defiance, which ultimately forced the minister to make a retreat that many saw as a humbling experience.

Kperogi commended Yerima’s poise and confidence, attributing his bravery to his moral upbringing and ingrained discipline. He noted that the young officer demonstrated that integrity can endure even in the face of authority by remaining respectful but uncompromising in the face of verbal threats, despite the significant social and political divide between the two men.

Nigerian ageism

The commentator also reflected on the cultural tendency in Nigeria for older individuals to use age as a weapon to suppress dissent. He referred to this as “reverse ageism,” where seniority is used to invalidate valid criticism, regardless of intellectual or emotional maturity.

Kperogi came to the conclusion that the viral altercation exposed Wike’s conceit more than Yerima’s youth, claiming that behavior, not age, is the ultimate test of maturity. He praised Yerima for standing up for a new generation of Nigerians who are not scared to confront intimidation with grace and logic.

His post in full …

“Three Quick Thoughts on Wike and Yerima

By Farooq Kperogi

I have read competing perspectives on the correctitude (or lack thereof) of FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and Lt. A.M. Yerima’s conduct in the viral video of their gladiatorial rhetorical combat. My concern, however, is different.

Several social media commentators, irrespective of partisan affiliations, appear united in proclaiming that Wike finally “met his match” in Yerima.

Interestingly, the Wike-Yerima confrontation reminded me of a puzzlingly paradoxical but deeply philosophical aphorism we were fond of as student union activists in the 1990s.

We used to say that when an unstoppable force (which Wike fancies himself as and which many people ascribe to him in light of his unfailingly boisterous, venomous-tongued cantankerousness that causes him to get whatever he wants all the time) meets an immovable object (which Yerima unwittingly became), something has to give.

Yerima has emerged, without planning to, as the first person, at least publicly, to make it clear to Wike that although Wike has acquired well-earned notoriety as a vicious, perpetually drunk, psychotic pocket tyrant who railroads people into kowtowing to him through intimidation, boozy taunts, and primitive vituperative aggression, he is “not a fool” who yields to inebriated, power-drunk, geriatric bullies.

Yerima’s repeated refrain of “I am not a fool, sir,” in response to Wike’s crude, unwarranted insults transcended a mere forceful retort. It communicated respectful but firm defiance to an insufferably self-important ministerial hoodlum.

Many people almost heard Yerima as saying, “I am not Fubara, sir.” Fool and Fubara almost have the same phonetic beginnings. Of course, I know that this is taking an innocuous, unplanned resistance to pocket tyranny to a partisan terrain.

But I am using Fubara here as the most recognized referent for disempowering spinelessness in the face of Wikean terrorization. And it helps that fool and Fubara share a curious, even if meaningless, initial pronunciational kinship, at least in demotic Nigerian English speech.

My second thought is on the admirable unflappability, courage, and self-assuredness that Yerima evinced in his encounter with Wike. There are vast generational, symbolic, social, and even political asymmetries between the two. But Yerima was not the least perturbed. He stood his ground and caused Wike to beat a humiliating retreat.

You don’t buy that kind of valor and self-confidence in the market. You unconsciously cultivate it from an impressionable age. It came as no surprise when it emerged that Yerima is the scion of an upper-crust military family.

Yet, at least from the video clips I saw, Yerima didn’t come across as arrogant or as someone who has a chip on his shoulder. But he showed that he wasn’t a fainthearted pushover, ether.

His father must have taught him a version of one of my favorite Malcolm Xian exhortations: “Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery.”

Yerima was polite, cordial, and conciliatory, but when Wike metaphorically put his rude, lowbred, insult-stained hand on the young man, he sent Wike to the rhetorical cemetery. Malcolm X characterized that as teaching people not to “suffer peacefully.”

My final thought on the confrontation is the almost involuntary predilection for gerontocratic egotism among older people in Nigeria when they have any dealings with younger people. I called this “reverse ageism” in an August 11, 2022, article I wrote titled “Reverse Ageism as a Tool to Gag Criticism in Nigeria.”

I reproduce the last few paragraphs of the article below because they speak to Wike’s gerontocratic putdown of Yerima as a “small boy” who was in “primary school” when he graduated from the university.

I wrote:

“One of Nigeria’s enduringly lumbering cultural burdens is that it’s hopelessly trapped in regressive reverse ageism, i.e., the idea that only old age, not youth or knowledge, should confer authority on people.

“Everyone who is older than the next person thinks his numerical age bestows some superiority on him over another.

“Emotional and intellectual age are immaterial in this culture of reverse ageism, so that even emotionally and cognitively immature dimwits trapped in adults’ bodies think of themselves as superior to biologically younger but intellectually superior people because of the accidents of their years of birth.

“But if you’re older than someone, someone is also older than you are, and the person you’re older than is also older than someone else. It’s an infinite continuum.

“Only backward, lowbrow bumpkins are hung up on age and invoke it to delegitimize valid criticism that they can’t confront with the resources of logic and evidence.

“Anyone who is over the age of 25 is a full-grown adult.”

Everything I wrote in that three-year-old article applies to Wike. Yerima (incidentally, Yerima is the Kanuri word for “prince,” which most northern Nigerian ethnic groups, including people of northern Edo, now bear as a personal name) is infinitely more mature and certainly more dignified than Wike can ever be in a million lifetimes, in spite of his youth.

So, who cares if Wike is older than Methuselah, especially because he behaves like a rambunctious toddler uneasily stuck in an adult’s body?”

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