From the way some Nigerians, especially supporters of Siminalayi Fubara, the Governor of Rivers State have been commenting on and reacting to the agreement brokered by President Bola Tinubu between him and his estranged godfather and predecessor in office, Nyesom Wike, any cursory follower of the political situation in Rivers State would be excused to think the matter was that simple.
If that was so, then one would wonder why such critics that were in a position to intervene in the dispute didn’t do so until Tinubu had to step in. There is no reason to suppose President Tinubu has been even-handed in his treatment of the matter.
It may, indeed, be asking too much of a wily grass roots as opposed to a text book politician with an eye to the next election like the president to broker a peace deal that may turn out to haunt him in a future as close as four years. Even his reported answer to the question asked by someone with the presence of mind to do so as a former Attorney-General of Rivers State, Adokiye Amiesimaka, about what Wike and his supporters in the dispute were bringing to the table- Tinubu’s response to Amiesimaka should make it clear that he was not in it for sheer altruism. He was both clear-eyed and pragmatic enough to see what he could take for himself out of it all.
According to the report, Tinubu wondered if he, a politician, could be expected to ask the group of law makers who said they had defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC) from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to return to the PDP. A clear case of opportunism, no doubt but what are politicians if not opportunists? What were the so-called stakeholders in the Rivers State PDP doing while these two leaders of the PDP jostled with each other? I guess they were having their secret laughters about how soon the two men had soured on each other.
They probably saw it all as a just recompense for the apparent perfidy of both men who turned their back on their party to work for the APC in the presidential election. They were not pragmatic enough to see that as their opportunity to bring back their party into the political conversations from which they had in recent times been excluded by both Wike and Fubara. They wanted to see both men fight to the finish without realising that such a fight could actually mark the end of the existence of their party in Rivers State. They wanted Wike and Fubara to suffer for their misdeed, apparently. They were in fact cutting their nose in order to spite their face without realising it.
That was the kind of error Bola Tinubu was not going to make. It is what makes the difference between him and his supporters in the APC, and their opponents in the PDP who are only capable of wielding power but are utterly incompetent at playing opposition politics. They left their door wide open for the enemy to walk into their home and are now out looking for scapegoats. They are coming in rather late to a ceremony that was all of theirs. But, hopefully, they are not too late to wind back the hand of the clock by their attempt to seek a judicial interpretation of the action both of the defected legislators and the Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly that had declared their seats vacant.
This may just be the first wise step, even if they might have taken it simply out of a sense of muddying the waters, taken by the PDP in Rivers State. For whether the combatants and their supporters like it or not, it’s too early to call time on the action of the former PDP legislators who claimed they defected due to a division in their party. The first thing the courts would have to do is to decide whether there was, indeed, a division in the party as to warrant the defection of the law makers as at the time they did. Otherwise, their action amounts to nothing but a nullity.
The so-called youths who are threatening to occupy everywhere in Rivers State and others like them who are insisting on the irreversibility of the action of the legislators and the reaction of the Speaker may well be on a wild goose chase. They had better stop now to see the lay of the land before coming back to accuse the judiciary of bias. There is increasingly more heat generated than light in the argument of supporters of Fubara in the dog fight between him and Wike. They are overtly emotional and overtaken by their disgust with Wike’s excesses that they are prepared to justify any action that could bring him to his knees.
They are boiling, venting and cussing all at the same time, as did Chief Edwin Clark on Channels Television’s ‘Sunday Politics’, only a couple of days ago. Their disgust and anger that can’t and won’t change the law should Fubara run foul of it or allow himself to be rail-roaded into a legal cul-de-sac has blinded them to a full appreciation of the situation on the ground. They fail to see the complicity of Fubara (a complicity that goes way back to how he emerged as governor under the wings of Wike), which he himself may not be blind to, in the unfolding scenario.
They have extended their hatred of Wike to a renewed hatred of Tinubu who he supported in the race to Aso Villa earlier in the year. For this reason, they can only see the action of a “meddlesome interloper” in his intervention in the Wike-Fubara imbroglio despite both genuine and self-serving calls from Nigerians that the President intervene. Either way, Tinubu cannot stand aloof while things degenerate. The same people will, otherwise, accuse him of playing Muhammadu Buhari who sat on his palms while Nigeria burned. Then would the same critics accuse him of doing nothing simply because it’s rewarding for him to see Rivers State destroyed by violence.
They would harangue us about how Nigeria, which some of them call a zoo, has become a laughing stock of their self-created international community that we all know is far more preoccupied with the war in Gaza and, far less importantly now, Ukraine, than the disagreement between two middling Nigerian politicians. Ultimately, it is Nigerians that will solve their own problems and in the present case in Rivers State, we may be doing worse to look anywhere else than to turn to Abuja for should things really get out of hand, Abuja is still in a position to declare a state of emergency. How would the critics like that?
By Rotimi Fasan
