The Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency, NIMASA, Dr. Dakuku Adol Peterside, has charged the Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, brace up and fight insecurity in the state.
Giving the charge in a statement in Port Harcourt Tuesday Peterside the governor should tackle insecurity in the state or decline taking another Oath of Office on May 29, 2019.
The NIMASA DG while reacting to the deteriorating security which has led to rising killings and relocation of businesses argued that as a state governor, Wike’s primary duty is to secure the lives and property of the people, without which citing of infrastructure and any other corollary of development would amount to zero.
He lamented that gradually, Rivers State was becoming a ghost state and a cemetery where terror runs riot round the clock and people live and move in daily fear of either kidnapper, dare-devil armed robbers, or marauding cultists who kill and beheaded at will.
“Life, in Rivers State, has become a sort of jackpot as residents who wake up in the morning are not sure of living to see another night, just as those who eventually make it to the night are uncertain they would see the next morning.
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When such residents manage to snatch a morsel of sleep, they wake up amid the horrors of severed heads, decapitated bodies, and trails of blood. To Rivers residents, day and night have both become emblems of terror”, said the governorship candidate of the Rivers APC in the 2015 election.
He added: “In Wike’s Rivers State, people are killed while waiting for or driving in traffic, on the streets, while watching a game of soccer and at homes. Both the poor and wealthy live in fear of each other.
The NIMASA Director General said that latest figures emerging from the state are both frightening and capable of permanently shutting out Rivers State from the list of potential business destinations for investors.
He countered Wike over his recent claims that International Oil Companies, OICs, operating in the state were responsible for the killings and kidnappings in the state, saying that the governor was only trying to play smart like the proverbial ostrich.
He insisted that insecurity had prospered in the state to the extent that the governor patronised it and its direct perpetrators.
Said Peterside; “Insecurity has been this lucrative for the direct actors because Mr. Governor has patronised and pampered its primary and passive perpetrators.
Wike knew that though keeping those violent structures from 2015, when he first contested for the governorship, to 2019, when he sought re-election, would build for him a charred and bloody boulevard to return to the Office of Governor of Rivers State, yet he cared less to the cost it would impose on the people.
Rather than protect Rivers State, as he swore to do on 29th May 2015, Wike chose to protect his gluttonous quest for public office.
Like his mentor, Emperor Nero, Wike partied and gulped drums of champagne while Rivers burnt.
He questioned whether the Rivers State Governor still had a conscience and wondered how he slept night after night as reports of fresh killings, hordes of kidnapping emerged on a daily basis. “Just like every sane citizen of Rivers State would ponder, I’m at a loss how Mr. Wike slept night after night when he received reports of daily killings and hordes of kidnappings that occurred in the state.”
He gave an account of the recent incidents thus: “Only on Sunday, reports emerged of mass murder of innocent natives of Kono-Bo-ue, a community in Khana local government, and by Monday morning, a community leader said it had risen to twenty.
On Monday morning, also, reports come that on Sunday night, about 2 persons were killed in Isiodu, Emohua local government, which were exclusive of the horror that the short Ndele-Ahoada stretch of the East-West road has become to locals and general road users.
A few weeks ago, a bus-load of commuters heading to Abua, in Abua-Odual local government area, had the passengers kidnapped even the bus driver was killed in cold blood.
About two days later, a bus conveying early bird travelers to Warri, Delta State, suffered a similar fate in the hands of armed kidnappers. The driver was also murdered in the presence of the passages. Those are fewer instances of reported cases as there were possibly many, many unreported such incidents.’