On December 30, 2025, at the Eneka Day celebration in Obio/Akpor, Senator John Azuta-Mbata stood before a cheering crowd and made a declaration that many in Rivers State had been waiting to hear spoken aloud.
“There is only one Governor in Rivers State,” he said, stressing that this reality stood “whether Wike liked it or not.”
For Mbata, President-General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo Worldwide, it was not a speech crafted for applause. It was a personal line in the sand.
For years, he had absorbed slights in silence, choosing restraint over confrontation. That day, restraint ended.
What followed between December 30, 2025, and January 1, 2026, was a blistering verbal war between Mbata and the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, one that peeled back years of buried history and exposed the deeper political realignment underway in Rivers State.
When Silence Became Too Heavy
Long before the exchange went public, Mbata had been navigating hostility quietly. Even before his election as president-general of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, it was widely known that Wike opposed his emergence.
After Mbata won, Wike publicly questioned his identity, insisting he is Ikwerre and not Igbo, remarks many interpreted as an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of his leadership. Mbata did not respond.
When some Ikwerre groups went as far as stripping him of traditional titles for accepting the Ohanaeze position, he still did not respond. He watched as the same communities that rejected him had once embraced an Igbo man as Governor without protest.
By the end of 2025, however, the political environment had changed. Governor Siminalayi Fubara, once politically subdued, was regaining confidence and institutional backing. Mbata publicly aligned with him, and the Eneka Day statement was the first outward sign of that choice. The response was swift, and vicious.
December 31: Memory as a Weapon
On December 31, 2025, Mbata released a video and statement that resonated across Rivers political circles. Gone was restraint. What emerged instead was rage sharpened by memory.
“One of the signs of very poor education and upbringing is that you can’t even pronounce simple words.
What is the meaning of integrity, integrity, integrity; what does that mean? Can somebody tell this semi-illiterate, swashbuckle, crisis-loving gentleman, you know, that this Rivers State belongs to all of us, not him alone, and that we will resist you, you won’t get away with all this nonsense you are doing,” Mbata said.
Then came the most personal strike: “You have forgotten the days you used to wash my car and I used to feed you and pay your school fees. You think you can talk to me anyhow, you are just an idiot,” Mbata added.
The words stunned even seasoned observers of Rivers politics. This was not a policy disagreement. This was hierarchy reversed, old debts dragged into the open, and suppressed memory weaponized.
Mbata’s core assertion was unmistakable: Wike did not own Rivers State, and would never own it.
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