The problem with having a godfather

Each time any of my younger siblings was rude to me or sometimes attempted to smack or slap me and then run away, my mum would wiggle her finger and warn them, ‘ma fi abara kekere gba nla’. Meaning, Funke’s palm is bigger than yours and so her slap will hurt more than the one from your smaller palm. That was the scenario that came to my mind when the Supreme Court smacked Governor Sim Fubara and Rivers State with that judgment that sent all the Local Government Chairmen back home to their wives. After reading through the story, I heaved a sigh, not of relief but of exhaustion. I said, wow, after all that drama and tension that preceded and followed the election, is this how it will all end? Remember that Governor Fubara was elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, but somehow the Action Peoples Party, APP, won leadership of 22 out of the 23 councils. Not PDP, his party. Think of the millions or billions that was expended on that election. And now this Supreme Court has trashed and thrashed both the money and the effort. A few strong men have decided that the votes counted and discounted mean nothing and Rivers people would have to go and look for more money, more billions to conduct the election that the courts, judges and law would approve. All that strain and stress and grandstanding just to lose to the court, not to the opposition party, PDP. What a shame. What a waste of time and deflation of ego.

So what are the lessons here? If your palm is small, do not slap the person with a bigger palm. His Excellency, Sim Fubara looks like he has taken on a bigger man or men. His palm is smarting but it looks like the man he slapped did not even wince. The slaps the governor has been dealt are enough to relocate anybody’s two ears to the same side of the head and I am not sure he has received the last slap yet. His fight with Minister Nyesom Wike has been, sad, bad and mad. It is not a fight that should have started in the first place but the ‘rightness’ or ‘wrongness’ of that fight is a subject that is ripe, not only for deep study but one for national debate. Those who want to quote the Bible or democratic tenets here are definitely not Nigerians. The godson and godfather politics, the I-will-choose-my-successor mentality of governors and the oppression and betrayal that follow are so totally incorrigibly Nigerian. That one godson is being slapped in 2025 does not mean prospective godsons are not lining up for endorsement. Indeed, Fubara will produce his own godson who he most likely will also slap into deafness. Nigerian politicians are unteachable like that.

Could Fubara have handled this better, more effectively? The answer would depend on where you are standing. If you are standing with the Rivers people whose funds, including the ones that will be withheld, you will see that they are the grass being trampled by all the elephants in this fight. They are the ones who voted a PDP governor and also voted APP local Government executives. Only God knows which party will win the next round.

The next lesson is do not accept and submit to godfatherism if you have no intention of following the tenets of the concept. A man does not become a godfather overnight. He knows things. He is capable of things. If he can suspend democratic tenets for you, he can suspend them again to un-father you. You cannot expect to enjoy the prize of being a godson without paying the price. If some peoples’ ambition and aspiration were discountenanced to favour you and you wore your godson robe proudly while pretending to be a democrat, weep not when the day of reckoning arrives.

Am I in support of Wike and making fun of Fubara? Far from it. The godfather-godson thing shortchanges me, you, the people, democracy, everybody. The only people who profit from it are the godson and his godfather. If they did not fall apart, would we have known some of the details of their alliance? And when politicians align, the people are hardly included in the equation. Or you think when they hold those closed door, nocturnal meetings, they discuss how to build new dams to generate more megawatts of electricity or make irrigation a national policy? No, they discuss a different kind of power, power sharing. They review who got what and will get what. It is when what brought them together separates them that they call in the lawyers, rush to the courts and generally entertain us for a while. The lawyers are cashing out from the bloated egos of the political actors while the judges are gradually establishing ‘judicracy’ – we vote, they decide who rules.

For now, let us wish Governor Fubara the fortitude to ride out this storm. I know he is not sleeping well. Who can, when people who are holding brooms are chasing you all night, only for you to wake up to find a fierce-looking umbrella-wielding one breathing fire by your bedside.