As indicated by public opprobrium and applauses that respectively trailed the orations of the duo of Godswill Akpabio and Siminalayi Fubara at the final funeral rites of the three Herbert Wigwes, who died in helicopter crash in the United States on February 9, 2024, the senate president was off humanistic point in altercating the Rivers governor’s admonition on the vanity of killing fellow humans in the course of political struggle. Fubara was quite on point.
His exhortation that Saturday, March 9, strikes accord with the time-tested sermons of the first century Christian apostles on the need for one to be guided in everyday activity by ephemerality of life in this world.
Notwithstanding that legal niceties fancied describing them as allegations or suspicions and the Nigerian law courts have been having difficulties in being convinced “beyond reasonable doubt”, cases of politics-induced deaths and attempted killings abound from Ibadan to Port Harcourt, Lagos to Abuja, Akwa Ibom to Benue, Calabar to Kaduna, Enugu to Abeokuta, among other places in Nigeria. No forensic is needed before knowing that there have been killings in the name of politics.
Typical of what news is, at the time of the tragic deaths of Herbert Wigwe, his wife, Chizoba and son, Chizi, among three others, the sad news was the leading headlines at the moment in the Nigerian news media. Unsurprisingly, the week-long funeral ceremonies that followed in Lagos and Rivers states were a mix of Nigeria’s political highbrow and captains of industry. Coupled with the fact that the Rivers political atmosphere, in recent time has been predominantly characterised by supremacy battle between godfather Nyesom Wike and godson Fubara, the latter was seizing the audience of the funeral service at Isiokpo to make a sensible talk to sensible people at a sensitive and strategic place.
However, without conceding to the at-all-costs and all-issues adversarial political fights that Akpabio tended unsuccessfully to rationalise, it must be acknowledged that struggle is one of the realities of life. Since life adversities are in-built in nature, from gestation period in the womb or soil to growing days on the earth surface, it takes struggle, not simple struggle, but strenuous struggle, for the living to survive.
As a game full of competitions, struggle does the play in politics. In Nigeria where self-interest supersedes collective welfare of the people and where the driving force is not ideologically inclined, the struggle revolves more on personality and less, if any, on matters that have bearing on the people.
It is on the strength of the foregoing that Nigeria’s main opposition PDP is currently fraught with internal fight along personal lines of two stalwarts in the party, instead of fortification of the fold of the party to square up with the ruling APC that has caused Nigeria more declines than development since 2015. Plagued by avarice and unassuaged thirst for power, bedeviled by flouting of due process and weaponization of endemic poverty in the land, the Nigerian political processes have been turning those who ought to be villains to heroes of democracy.
The paradox of those who see public offices as elixirs and have the craving of leveraging on them perpetually is that they are very weak and not as courageous and strong as their public postures portray them. With trillion-naira assignment of ploughing (or playing with?) development in Abuja, Wike ought to be more in the news on workable plans to give the Nigeria’s capital territory a befitting city look, with greater commensurate value to the FCT residents and Nigerians, than the two-elephant fight that is now giving more definitions of who he is.
Wike is winking at Rivers that he governed between 2015 and 2023, all because Fubara has since proven that he is poor at being a puppet governor that he (Wike) naively expected him (Fubara) to be. When he was the governor of Rivers, Wike had been lauded time and time again by a wide spectrum of the Nigerian public either on account of infrastructural development that occurred in the state under his watch or on the perception of being exemplary opposition leader.
Whether the accolade came from right or wrong sense of judgement, what is very glaring now is that Wike is bad at mastering the guiding rule of a thorough breed dancer, hence not knowing when to quit the stage amidst louder ovation. Whatever the final outcome would be, except Wike, a prime factor, makes immediate detour in devouring democracy in Rivers, the raging rift in Rivers may mark the beginning of his trip to meeting his waterloo in politics.
Although there is distinguishable professional and career traits and traces between Peter Odili and Wike, the lawyer who makes his mark only in politics should learn something from how the medical doctor-turned-politician occupies himself after his eight-year governorship tenure in Rivers. Odili has not been in public office or hold any political post since leaving the Rivers Government House in 2007, yet so many, including his admirers and adversaries, still hold him in the estimation of a father-figure in the state.
Apart from having existing and excellent addresses of work before and after occupying public offices, which anyone can be referred to, Odili, in spite of having his own travails to deal with, has had the maturity of deciphering when to struggle, whom and what to struggle against, what to struggle for and whom and what not to struggle with. On top of lacing humane consciousness in battling with life brouhaha, being guided by the questions of what, why, when, with whom, against who and their likes constitute the determinants of worthiness or unworthiness of a struggle.
On the Fubara-Wike saga, all true lovers of democracy should rally around Rivers. In doing so, cognizance should be taken of the fact that Nigeria, of which Rivers is part of, is a constitutional democracy. By implication, the wishes and actions of the people regarding government must be anchored on the laws of the land. To impute strange principles to relevant laws in effort to quell the quagmire in Rivers would be anomalous, amounting to dethronement of constitutionalism, which in turn amounts to subversion of democracy.
President Bola Tinubu’s intervention in brokering peace between the two gladiators was a stentorian step but it was a truce without truth, in that the terms to ameliorating the crisis was fashioned outside the letters and spirit of the constitution, which is the ground norm of our democracy. It is quite satisfying that, so far, a court of competent jurisdiction has decided that the status of the legislators, who defected from the party they were elected to another party, have lost the mandate of the people to retain their positions in the Rivers State House of Assembly.
A handshake with a president at the presidential villa may be so reveling. Fubara may also have strong disposition to peace. But that lofty cut and allure of presidential encounter should not be enough for someone who has the backing of the law in exercising authority in an office to become an accomplice in compromising constitutional principles.
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Considering the mandate to preside over the affairs of Rivers and commonplace awareness that enemies of democracy are prowling democratic places with camouflages of democrat to devour democracy, it would be foolhardy on the part of Fubara to be met off guard at anytime. Cardinally, while all the strugglers on this matter should not be swayed away from Fubara’s humanistic sermon on the mount of Isiokpo, the need to get him off the dictatorial grip of Wike is a struggle worth struggling. It is neither for the person of Fubara nor against a fellow called Wike but for the survival of democracy in Rivers.
. Ekanem sent this piece through nsikak4media@gmail.com
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