By Nze Amb. Val. Ugo-Akpe Onwuka JP (Oyi)
Femi Fani-Kayode’s latest outburst is not a warning, it is a spectacle of political desperation dressed up as historical concern.
There is something deeply revealing about a man who watches a gathering of opposition leaders in Ibadan, a routine democratic exercise in any sane republic, and immediately begins to hallucinate civil war. It tells you everything you need to know about the state of his politics. When dialogue looks like danger to you, it is not because danger exists, it is because your comfort has always depended on the absence of dialogue.
Let us be clear. No one at that summit declared violence. No one issued a call to arms. What took place was what should have been normal in a functioning democracy, consultation, coalition-building, and the search for a credible alternative. But to Fani-Kayode, even the idea of opposition unity is so terrifying that he must drag Nigeria back into the graveyard of 1965 just to steady his nerves.
This is not patriotism. It is intellectual dishonesty at its most shameless.
“Operation Wetie” is not a throwaway phrase to be tossed into Facebook theatrics. It represents one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s political history, a time of arson, killings, and chaos that ultimately destabilized the First Republic. To invoke it recklessly, without evidence, without context, and without responsibility, is not cautionary, it is exploitative. It is the political equivalent of lighting a match in a room filled with dry straw and then pretending you are the fire marshal.
What exactly is the crime here? That Nigerians with differing political interests met to talk? That opposition figures are refusing to disappear quietly into the margins while one political tendency attempts to dominate the entire national space? If that is now a threat, then the real danger is not in Ibadan, it is in the shrinking tolerance for democracy itself.
Fani-Kayode’s argument collapses under its own weight. On one hand, he insists no one is intimidated. On the other, he writes as though the mere idea of opposition coordination could trigger national catastrophe. Which is it? You cannot claim confidence while simultaneously screaming apocalypse. That contradiction is not an oversight, it is the exposed wiring of panic.
And let us address the subtext he carefully avoids. The fear is not violence. The fear is competition. The fear is that Nigerians may begin to look beyond recycled power structures and demand something better. The fear is that 2027 may not be as predictable as those who have grown fat on political monopoly would prefer.
So rather than engage ideas, they summon ghosts. Rather than debate policy, they weaponize memory. Rather than strengthen democracy, they attempt to stigmatize its most essential ingredient, opposition.
Nigeria deserves better than this brand of political fear-mongering. We cannot continue to allow individuals to drag the country backwards every time they feel their relevance slipping. The future of this nation will not be negotiated through emotional blackmail or historical distortion.
Let it be said without ambiguity, no amount of alarmist rhetoric will delegitimize the right of Nigerians to organize, to disagree, and to build alternatives. Democracy is not a one-party inheritance, and it will not be reduced to one by those who mistake access to power for ownership of the state.
If anything is dangerous, it is not a meeting in Ibadan. It is the mindset that believes such a meeting must be silenced, distorted, or demonized.
That is where the real threat lies.
Nze Amb. Val. Ugo-Akpe Onwuka JP (Oyi) – National Convener, ADC Polling Unit Commanders.
