The spectacle playing out in Rivers State is disconcerting. It should bother all lovers of peace and democracy. It reflects a tawdry tailspin that has been assailing our democractic experience for decades now — The gofather, godson imbroglio.
Usually, an outgoing governor grooms a supposedly pliable successor from among his commissioners or a top member of the ‘inner caucus’ of his administration. He then pulls all the stops to secure his victory at the polls and get him installed. This is ostensibly so the mentee could watch His Excellency’s back after exiting power.
He can hardly afford to allow an ‘unfriendly’ or an opposition candidate take the throne after him. Who knows? The new ‘Pharoah’ who doesn’t know ‘Joseph’ may get ideas, upend the system and expose His Excellency’s fetid underbelly through a decapitating probe!
However, after the initial honeymoon and rounds of fulsome courtesies, the hitherto bootlicking, genuflecting governor’s ‘boy’ suddenly becomes a chameleon. He now wants to be his own man. He soon begins to show his usually domineering godfather that he is the new sheriff in town. The latter, petrified, demures. Bitter recriminations ensue. It is always a ‘roforofo.’
Safe a few states where the arrangement has succeeded relatively, it has always ended in fiasco. And the tremor from the godfather, godson tango has often sundered peace and development from the affected state, leaving things botched up. After all, when two elephants fight,it is the grass that suffers, so says the proverb.
Rivers State has seen the misfortune of being literally despoiled by this spectacle. First, it was Rotimi Amaechi and Nyesome Wike, who held the state by the balls some years back when the narrow tendon meshing their godfather, godson relationship suddenly snapped.
Matters between Wike, who was Amaechi’s right hand man as his Chief of Staff between 2007 and 2011 when the latter was governor, suddenly turned adversarial and Wike started pandering to the dictates of another South-South leader, Goodluck Jonathan, an Amaechi’s political-friend-turned-foe, who along the line became president and began to use his imperial power against Amaechi.
Wike played what was perceived to be a perfidious card to a propitious advantage. He clinched the position of minister state between July, 2011 and April, 2014 and later won elections as a two-term Rivers governor (2015-2023). He benefited tremendously from then President Jonathan’s magisterial ‘magic wand’ and that of his domineering wife, Patience, a Rivers woman, who had a direct spat with Amaechi and was actually pulling the levers of presidential power against him.
Wike soon upstaged his erstwhile boss in the Rivers’ delicate power game, a development which drove him (Amaechi) from the then ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the then opposition All Progressives Congress (APC). But the imprimatur of power remains with Wike, which was why he was able to deliver Rivers State to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu in the 2023 presidential poll, in spite of Amaechi’s opposition to Tinubu’s presidency.
However, as the saying goes, the cane with which the senior wife was whipped is hidden behind the door for her junior. It is now the turn of Wike, who is now the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), to sniff with the whiff of a godson’s perceived treachery. Wike it was who used his gubernatorial clout and resources to install his Accountant-General, Siminalayi Fubara, as his successor in the 2023 governorship election.
It is widely believed that Wike might have also bankrolled the election of many of the elected political officials in Rivers State during the 2023 general elections, which explains why he has the firm control of the Rivers State House of Assembly to date.
Fubara was so effusive in his gratitude to Wike at his swearing-in on May 29,2023, revealing the degree of his indebtedness for clinching the governorship position. In return, Wike also nominated a sizeable number of commissioners in Fubara’s cabinet, heading key ministries such as Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Finance, Education, Housing, Social Welfare, Environment, and Transport.
But the camaraderie between Wike and Fubara, in spite of that, lasted only five months. The tendon of peace snapped too soon. And like the elders say, the fowl perches on the rope; neither the fowl nor the rope knows no peace. This succinctly captures the situation in Rivers State. It is odious that the state has since been oscillating between sporadic violence and peace of the graveyard.
The first whiff of trouble stole in, on the night of Sunday, October 29, 2023, some five months after the new governor took oath, when an inferno razed the assembly complex, caused by explosives purportedly ignited by unknown arsonists. But the mystery fire precipitated a series of other events at a dizzy pace, one of which was the impeachment proceedings initiated by the majority members of the state House of Assembly against Fubara, which commenced by the dawn of the following day, Monday, October 30, over alleged gross misconduct.
The impeachment attempt soon fragmented the Assembly into two factions both laying claim to being the authentic faction and having parallel sittings. The judiciary was dragged into the fray with both sides getting ex-parte orders and several court injunctions in their favour in Port Harcourt and Abuja.
On Tuesday, December 12, Justice Monina Danagogo of the Rivers State High Court in Port Harcourt ruled, quite curiously, that the Speaker of the four-member minority faction, loyal to Fubara, Edison Ehie, is the authentic Speaker. The judge also restrained Martin Amaewhule and Dumle Maol, from the faction loyal to Wike, from parading themselves as Speaker and Deputy Speaker respectively, or interfering with the activities of Ehie as the Speaker of the Assembly. This emboldened Fubara as he hurriedly presented the state’s N800 billion 2024 Appropriation Bill to the four-member Assembly on Wednesday, December 13, and signed the same into law the following day.
Fubara then ordered the demolition of the gutted House of Assembly. The same day he presented the budget to the minority House, excavators, wheel loaders, and other earth-moving equipment moved to the torched complex and levelled it. On Monday, December 11, 27 Rivers State lawmakers loyal to Wike defected to the APC, citing divisions within their party, the PDP, as well as the refusal of the state governor to pay their salaries and allowances.
Sources from Fubara’s camp were said to have attributed the genesis of the crisis to Wike’s allegedly excessive demands and suffocatingly domineering attitude. But Wike, responding on a Channels TV programme, denied the allegation.
He said the genesis of the crisis was that the governor plotted a coup to remove the speaker of the state Assembly and the gamble, according to him, boomeranged. “It is not about demand for resources. Has he (Fubara) ever told you that I said he should go and bring any money, and that’s why I am fighting him?” he asked.
However, the festering crisis, at a stage, began to attract the attention of stakeholders in and outside the state, because the wheels of state were already grinding into a halt and orderliness was beginning to take a flight. The most outstanding intervention was that of President Tinubu, who mediated the crisis. It was far-reaching.
The kernel of the eight-point resolution signed by the mediators and warring parties in the crisis on Monday, December 18, 2023, was as follows:
*Fubara and his allies will withdraw all court cases related to the crisis.
*The state House of Assembly will drop impeachment proceedings initiated against the governor.
*The leadership of the House, under Speaker Amaewhule, will be recognised, along with the 27 lawmakers, who defected from the Peoples Democratic Party.
*Fubara will re-present the 2024 budget to the Amaewhule-led Assembly.
*Salaries and benefits for all Assembly members and staff will be restored.
*The Assembly will have autonomy to choose its location and conduct business without interference from the executive.
*The governor will resubmit the names of the commissioners who resigned for approval.
*The dissolution of local governments was declared null and void.
Much hope was pinned on this presidential intervention to restore lasting peace to the state, but unfortunately, that was not to be as another phase of the rancour, which is a test-of-will standoff, a power tussle for the political control of the state.
Although Fubara implemented most of the resolutions, but he did not re-present the state budget to the Speaker, Amaewhule-led faction, as agreed. And when the tenure of the 23 Local Government chairpersons and councillors ended in May 2024, the Amaewhule faction of the Assembly extended their tenure by six months.
However, in a May 21, 2024 verdict, Justice Daketima Kio nullified the extension with a declaration that the new law was inconsistent with the 1999 Constitution and Section 9 (1) of Rivers State Law No. 5 of 2018, which fixed the tenure of Rivers LG chairmen and councillors at three years.
It was another legal victory for Fubara, who in June, 2024, moved to consolidate on the victory by appointing caretaker committees to oversee the affairs of the 23 LGAs in the state pending the time the Rivers State Independent Electoral Commission(RSIEC)would conduct proper election into the councils.
However, the Supreme Court judgement of July 11, 2024, which granted financial autonomy to local governments in Nigeria also made it contingent for all local councils in Nigeria to be democratically governed in accordance with section 7(1) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria(as amended).
But the federal and state governments agreed on a three-month moratorium on the judgment of the Supreme Court. It was upon this that Fubara premised his calculated decision to conduct October 5, 2024 Rivers State local government elections on October 5, 2024 instead of October 31, 2024. He claimed that if he did not conduct the elections before October 31, 2024, the Federal Government would seize the state allocation to LGAs.
Meanwhile, in the Ward, LGA, and State PDP congresses held in the state, Fubara’s camp lost to his political godfather, Wike. The governor, therefore, asked his supporters to move to Action Peoples Party (APP) to contest the October 5 election.
At the end of the exercise, the RSIEC chairman, Justice Adolphus Enebeli, declared that APP won chairmanship in 22 of the 23 LGAs and 314 out of the 319 councillorship seats. Action Alliance won the Etche LGA chairmanship position. Ahead of the LG polls, there was a series of litigation and protests from Wike’s camp to prevent the elections from being held. The newly elected council heads were inaugurated on Sunday, October 6, 2024.
The situation took the turn for the worse when protests and arson rocked several of the council secretariats. Ikwerre, Emourha, Eleme and some other council secretariats were torched by arsonists. Some deaths were also recorded. The dingdong affair continued to fester.
However, a Supreme Court judgment delivered on February 28,2025 in the midst of the brewing tension, has brought the crisis to a sort of dramatic denouement. As it is, it has reversed some of the earlier legal gains of Fubara and like some analysts implied, the verdict is akin to handing the reins of power in the state back to Wike.
The apex court ruled, among others, that the October 5, 2024 Local Government elections did not comply with the Electoral Act, while appropriations based on a budget presented to a four-member Assembly are clearly illegal. Wike has had the last laugh. Not only is the coast clear for him to repossess the Local Government councils through a proper election since he has retained the state’s political structure through the last PDP congresses, his majority faction of the House of Assembly has also been legally recognized.
In other words, he now has the yam and the knife! Fubara, on the other hand, has been subdued. There is, therefore, subdued jubilation in Wike’s camp—Amaewhule- led faction of the Rivers State House of Assembly, the Tony Okocha-led faction of the APC— and the faction of the PDP loyal to Wike. There is, however, indignation in Fubara’s camp.
At this stage, we are admonishing Wike to put on the toga of statesmanship and be magnanimous in victory because rather than abate tension, the apex court’s judgment has exacerbated it. Many sections of the state are becoming increasingly restive as the import of the Supreme Court verdict gains momentum.
Already, the Speaker (Wike’s man) has ordered all the council chiefs sworn in on the strength of the nullified Fubara-conducted polls to vacate office. There are indications that the Wike boys (former councilmen) who were driven away by the Fubara boys, through the now voided election, are warming up to move in. This will definitely precipitate violence, which will be difficult to quell by the police. Pressure is reportedly being mounted on Fubara to declare a state of emergency.
Meanwhile, from Wike’s body language, the FCT minister may go for broke— outright impeachment of Fubara. And the coast is clear if he decides to toe that path since his men are now in charge.
But that will be at a colossal cost to peace, because the dreaded Niger Delta militants in the creeks have warned that they will begin violent campaigns that will savagely hurt oil installations if Fubara is given the boot. And Rivers State is hosting the nation’s substantial oil assets.
Seeing these scenarios, stakeholders, including President Tinubu, have called for caution from both camps, so as not to set the state on fire. Fubara himself has called for calm, asking the people to go about their lawful businesses, while awaiting full interpretation of the apex court’s judgment.
At this stage, we urge President Tinubu to move in full throttle, call Wike to order and convey another peace parley, which will, this time involve brilliant and experienced legal experts with a view to resolving the crisis once and for all in line with the court verdict. The experts will meticulously decipher the Supreme Court verdict and appropriately interpret all the declarations. This is with a view to working out the implementation in a manner that will stave off violence.
Our strongest appeal goes to the FCT Minister to play the big brother to Fubara and spare him. After all, he has made his point. The governor is already patently subdued. He is now conciliatory, offering an olive branch to his boss. Wike should accept in the interest of peace and the nation’s oil health and agree a soft landing for the already sober governor.
