The tension in Rivers

IT is distressing but not really surprising that the political disagreement between Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State and his immediate predecessor and estranged political godfather, Nyesom Wike, has continued to fester. This is in spite of the intervention by President Bola Tinubu, on multiple occasions, to broker peace between the duo. Many had expected the two leaders to find a common ground and work together harmoniously, or at least set boundaries and respect them in the interest of peace and the people of Rivers State. We are not surprised that the feud is still ongoing because at the core of the prolonged battle is control of political structures in the oil-rich state. And in a clime where a preponderance of politicians do not have a second address, the desperation to have control over political structures can be high, since it is at the centre of their continued political relevance or otherwise. It should be noted that this needless battle had resulted in three impeachment attempts against the Rivers governor and a six-month suspension from office in the wake of the state of emergency declared by the Federal Government on March 18, 2025.

Yet, the contending parties have not sheathed their sword or let the interest of Rivers people to dictate their actions. Otherwise, Wike’s threat to forcibly enter the Yakubu Gowon Stadium in the future if the state government prevented him and his supporters from holding political events in the facility would not have arisen. Chris Green, the Commissioner for Sports in the state, claimed that no one prevented Wike and his supporters from using the stadium and that the state government never received any application to use the facility from Wike’s group. And he raised a poser as to how the government could have considered, let alone rejected an application it didn’t receive in the first place. However, in the same breath, Green said the facility was currently undergoing reconstruction with many heavy-duty equipment working within the stadium, a situation that would make political gathering or any gathering at all within the facility unsafe.

Based on precedent, it is safe to infer from the state official’s claims that Wike and his group may have been tacitly denied the use of the facility. The common refrain by ruling parties while denying political opponents the use of any public facility is to claim that the facility is being renovated or reconstructed. This is unfair and morally reprehensible. Nonetheless, that is not a sufficient ground to threaten to resort to self-help. While it may be morally wrong for the state government to deny individuals or groups the use of a public facility, the state is not breaking any known law by so doing, since it has stated its reason(s) for the denial. Whether the reason given for such denial is genuine or not is another matter that has to be legally proved. And even at that, before or after establishing the tenability or otherwise of the official reason for the denial, no one is permitted to make a recourse to anarchy.

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Ironically, evidence abounds that no one dared to try what Wike is threatening to do in Rivers when he was in the saddle. We wonder what has become of the golden rule which is rooted in fairness and equity: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Under Wike as governor of Rivers State, Abubakar Atiku, the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2023, could not campaign in Rivers State. Though both Atiku and Wike were members of PDP, they belonged to different tendencies within the party. While many may say it is payback time for Wike, we do not believe the error of the past should be repeated because the truth is that if it was wrong for Wike to have prevented Atiku from campaigning in Rivers State in 2023, it cannot possibly be right for Fubara to prevent Wike from holding a political campaign in the state’s public facility in 2026, if indeed that was what happened.

The potential victims of political instability in Rivers State are the ordinary people of the state whose sitting governor is perennially being pressured to prioritise political survival over and above governance. And one cannot blame him wholly for such a course of action. After all, self-preservation is the first law of nature. We feel for the people of Rivers; decisions are being made about them without their input.  And worse still, most of such decisions are self-serving, detracting markedly from the interests of the people of the state. The governor would seem to be interested in being in the saddle beyond 2027, which, of course, is constitutional and within his rights, and Wike would do anything to continue to hold sway in the political firmament of the state, controlling the political structures. These are mutually exclusive ambitions by two political foes and the more both parties insist on realising their ambitions at all cost, the more the political chaos that will be witnessed in the state.

Not even the fact that both parties defer politically to the same principal, President Tinubu, has dampened the bitterness between them. Already, Wike’s group is accusing the governor’s group of trying to destabilise Tinubu’s reelection bid in 2027, citing the stadium incident as an indication of the plan. The loyalists of Governor Fubara, too, have promptly denied the allegation, describing it as blackmail. Meanwhile, the allegation and its rebuttal are meant to put the authors in the good books of President Tinubu, nothing more. The Rivers case presents the extreme politics of Nigerian politicians. The president and governor are members of All Progressives Congress (APC) while Wike is in PDP, working for the APC government as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, and he seems to have the ears of Mr President. The dilemma is that by convention, Fubara is the leader of APC in Rivers State but through unusual political manoeuvre and dexterity, Wike seeks to control the political structures of both APC and PDP in the state, and he has said time and again that the two structures will go into the next elections as a rainbow coalition. That is why certain pronouncements allegedly made by Fubara that are suggestive of his political leadership of APC in the state elicited sharp reactions from Wike.

It is a very complex political development that promises to benefit President Tinubu, head or tail. However, we urge President Tinubu to be a statesman and not a typical politician in the circumstance. He should prevail on the feuding parties, who are obviously within his circle of influence, to allow peace to reign. In this regard, it is instructive that the president held a peace parley with the duo this week.