In every democracy, words are never idle. They are the raw material of persuasion, the building blocks of public trust and the bridge between leadership and the governed. Yet, in Nigeria, political discourse has long been reduced to a noisy bazaar where words are hawked, twisted, exchanged, and often devalued. Politicians say today what they denied yesterday, only to recant tomorrow with bare-faced bravado. This habitual double-speak, laced with insults, diatribes and invectives, is not merely bad form, it is corrosive to democracy itself.

Consider the latest quarrels in Kano, where former governor and erstwhile national chairman of the APC, Dr. Abdullahi Ganduje, has shot a pulverizing jab at his one-time political mentor, Senator Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. Ganduje did not merely disagree with Kwankwaso, he dragged him into a pit of imagery so sordid it can hardly be called political debate. He branded him a “madman returning to vomit” and likened democracy itself to a space populated by “fake clerics and thieves.” This, from a man who served eight years as Kwankwaso’s deputy and another eight years as his successor, reveals less about Kwankwaso than it does about the decayed ethos of Nigeria’s politics. To dismiss an opponent with such venom is to corrode the very dignity of leadership.

Perhaps Ganduje’s invocation of “madmen returning to vomit” is more than crude insult; it may well be payback in the same coin. According to the Vanguard report, Ganduje reminded his audience that “Kwankwaso once said only a madman would join APC. In other words, Ganduje turns Kwankwaso’s earlier invective into a political boomerang. What was once a rhetorical rebuff to defectors now becomes the very standard by which returnees are judged; a circular logic of insult that reveals how politicians recycle language to shame opponents under the veneer of consistency.

Only a few months ago, in May, Ganduje had struck a markedly conciliatory tone, describing Kwankwaso as “a fish out of water, trying to find its way back into the waters.” He assured him that the APC could still accommodate him, reasoning that “a friend in need is a friend indeed” and likening the gesture to a father offering shelter to his son. That was the language of kinship, reconciliation and political accommodation. Fast-forward to the present, however, and the register has changed dramatically. The metaphors of fish and shelter have been displaced by the vitriolic imagery of “madmen” and “vomit.” In this semantic drift lies the real story: how political language in Nigeria often oscillates from conciliatory to caustic, depending on the shifting tides of expediency.

That such coarse language should flow from the lips of Ganduje, a man who once bore the gubernatorial seal of Kano with all its solemn trappings, lays bare the tragic velocity with which today’s trusted ally can be recast as tomorrow’s mortal foe. It also unmasks the ease, almost the frivolity, with which words are weaponized in Nigeria’s power arena: words that ought to heal, to reconcile, to build consensus, are instead twisted into cudgels of derision in the endless scramble for advantage.

Perhaps, though, Ganduje’s “madman” innuendo was not entirely spontaneous but calculated, a payback in coin already minted by Kwankwaso himself. For it was Kwankwaso who once dismissed the idea of returning to the APC as fit only for a “mad man.” By flinging back the insult, Ganduje was not merely attacking; he was repurposing his erstwhile godfather’s own words, turning the verbal blade against its original wielder. What began as Kwankwaso’s rhetorical barb has thus come full circle, weaponized afresh in the theatre of Kano politics.

Nor is Kwankwaso himself innocent of this verbal brinkmanship. Here is a man who once styled himself as the red-capped general of Kano politics, commanding legions of followers with the aura of a movement. Yet, in his bid to carve space outside the APC, he too has not hesitated to lace his words with the acid of contempt, branding any return to the fold as fit only for “madmen.” Such utterances betray how quickly conviction can harden into derision, and how a leader’s tongue, rather than uniting, can sever ties with surgical cruelty.

Nor does Ganduje stop at Kwankwaso. He describes the current NNPP administration of Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf as a “government of vendetta and cluelessness,” even as “a government of bandits.” That word – bandit – has taken on a new life in Nigeria’s political and social lexicon. Once traced to its bandito etymology in Italian, denoting outlawry, it has undergone a semantic drift of unusual proportions. In 2016, when the security crises began to worsen, “bandits” emerged in popular discourse to capture marauders in the North-West.

Today, the word has migrated from criminal denotation into political and moral registers: Nasir El-Rufai spoke of “urban bandits;” Governor Hyacinth Alia of Benue thunders against “religious bandits.” Of late, Nigerians have been treated to phrases like “judicial bandits” with former President Obasanjo’s depiction of the transition from ‘court of justice to court of corruption,’ Sultan of Sokoto’s ‘justice as purchasable commodity’ remarks at 2025 NBA Conference in Enugu, and even “royal bandits,” given recent arrest of a Kwara monarch and his queen in alleged connection with bandit-kidnapping incident. The inflation of the term reflects both the country’s festering insecurity and its dangerous moral bankruptcy.

Kano is no stranger to fierce political rivalries, but the vitriol between Ganduje and Kwankwaso points to a deeper malaise: the erosion of political civility and the collapse of ideological consistency. Both men once built their careers together, only to stand today as bitter foes trading insults in the public square. To the ordinary citizen, the spectacle is anything but inspiring; it is, in fact, deeply disheartening. Former Governor Kayode Fayemi had, during his February birthday lecture, warned Nigerians not to take too seriously the public quarrels of career politicians. Why? Because such quarrels are designed to entertain the unsuspecting masses.

After the verbal fireworks, these same gladiators retreat into the inner chambers of power to clink glasses of champagne. Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah rephrased this truth more recently at the Accra Democracy Summit, cautioning Nigerians not to die in the stage-managed wars of politicians. His reason was piercing: politicians never fight when it is time to share money. Perhaps, with the benefit of both partisan and ecclesiastical hindsight, Nigerians should think twice before expending their emotions on the Ganduje-Kwankwaso altercation, which bears more resemblance to a madman’s drama than to statesmanship.

But Kano is hardly alone in this amorphous bazaar of political discourse. One need only look southward to the Rivers of contradiction, where Nyesom Wike has perfected partisan ambidexterity – straddling the PDP and the APC with the vice grip of an octopus. Once the most strident voice condemning the ruling party as a “stage-four cancer,” Wike today luxuriates in the warm embrace of the very house he swore never to enter. In his own words, he preferred to “live with malaria” (PDP) than to succumb to “cancer” (APC).

The analogy was vivid, and Nigerians understood the implication: malaria, though unpleasant, can be treated; cancer at stage four is terminal. Wike was categorical that he would never defect to the APC, describing it as a party that had “killed” Nigeria. His zigzagging loyalties dramatize the fluidity, even absurdity, of Nigeria’s political alignments, where yesterday’s mortal enemy becomes today’s benefactor and tomorrow’s bargaining chip.

Yet, today, he is firmly ensconced in the very party he ridiculed as terminally diseased, basking in the privileges of high office while offering no apology for his volte-face. In less than three years, the language of mortal condemnation has given way to the language of expediency. What was once “cancer that will kill” has become a party under which he now serves as a minister. For citizens, the lesson is sobering. If politicians can so quickly disown their own words, how much value should voters attach to their promises during campaigns? But in fairness to evidence of balance, Wike, like Kano, is not a lone ranger in the zigzagging politics of amoeba as yesterday’s bitter enemies across the isle of opposition politics are today’s bosom friends, locked in a strange embrace, snuggling up as bedfellows in a marriage of sheer convenience.

• Agbedo writes from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN)

The post Politicians and matter of words appeared first on The Sun Nigeria.