The strange alignment in Rivers

BY KENE OBIEZU

Politics has always been described as a game. Those who play politics see themselves caught up in a game. For many of them, it is a game of numbers, which often boils down to who stands where and when.

But unlike sports with all its noble attributes, politics is a brutal game where the loser could lose everything, including their lives. Indeed, many have lost their lives in Nigeria while playing politics. In politics, desperately dark politicking typically takes precedence over sportsmanship and even basic human decency.

In a country with more failures to tally than successes since independence because of apocalyptic leadership, politics has been a disaster for the people.

In Rivers state, after Siminalayi Fubara replaced Nyesom Wike as governor, the state was practically set for a smooth ride and reunion of political allies united by their shared political interests.

Things were to spectacularly fall apart months later, though, when Fubara began to exert himself in office. What followed was a dramatic fallout that saw the camps of both men call each other unprintable names.

As things unfolded, Fubara was cast, albeit too quickly and too casually, as a man fighting for the people against the intrusive behemoth that Wike was and because Nigerians, starved of good leadership for many years, love a hero, an underdog, and a messiah, they rallied behind him. The dicey and delicate situation saw the state caught up in some form of crisis orchestrated mainly by the supporters of Wike. In declaring a state of emergency on March 18, President Tinubu placed loyalty to one of his key allies above the law. The criticisms were quick and cutting.

But recently, at the instance and intervention of the president, both men have been on a mission to mend fences, but who will mend the wounds of Nigerians, especially of the good people of Rivers state, who seem to lurch from one disaster to another?

For many of those who supported Fubara, the sense of betrayal is as shocking as it is biting, even if not entirely surprising. When the volcano of the whole crisis was still squirting out only a little magma, there were many who were shocked by the undercurrents of betrayal. Despite their intense dislike for Wike, they wondered how Fubara could even possibly think of turning against a man who practically dusted him out of nowhere and made him governor. For those people, he surely could manage it better. But he clearly did not, revealing in the process that ingratitude is one of his weaknesses.

Still, many Nigerians took his side as the crisis unfolded, not really because they supported him, but because Wike cuts many people the wrong way, and godfatherism has long been recognised and loathed as a root cause of Nigeria’s leadership problems. The drop that caused the beaker to overflow for many was when President Tinubu decided to kill a fly with a sledgehammer by slamming a state of emergency on the state. Surely, too much was too much.

The state of emergency has held fast in the state, with the illegal and unconstitutional sole administrator pounding down the parade of illegalities to the bemusement and rattling criticism of Nigerians in and outside the state.

For Fubara to seek to and surrender to any phoney reconciliation with Wike’s camp after everything that has happened in the state is an unforgivable act of contemptible cowardice. Giving in, especially on the conditions which would amount to a hijack of the state’s power structure and resources by people alien to the wishes expressed at the ballot box by the long-suffering people of Rivers state in 2023, is akin to death without any honour. This ferocious conflation of cowardice and ingratitude is a scandalous act of betrayal, and no amount of peace talk or explanation can water the ground to give him a soft landing.

It also opens an unflattering and unforgiving window into the character of a man whom many Nigerians had supported without a second’s thought as he fought back against a cabal. The questions pile up: What was the grandstanding all about? Was there any real substance before it all turned to straw? Why run so hard and so far on the track only to buckle and bend the knee in humiliation?

Nigerians are bone-sick of the kinds of politicians they have been cursed with. Every country has its own peculiar struggles, but a doomed country is one in which no one really seems to stand for anything, and leaders especially seem consumed by self-interest and self-service.

Now that the jackals have seemingly ceased their squabbling and arrived at a sharing formula in Rivers state, no drop of blood or piece of bone will be spared.

Kene Obiezu can be contacted via [email protected]