If poetic justice ever played out in the rough and tumble circumstances of Nigerian politics, the case of Siminalayi Fubara, currently sitting as governor of Rivers State, must qualify as one instance. The Supreme Court had last week Thursday declared him the legitimately elected governor of Rivers State on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), in its ruling on an appeal filed against his tenure by Tonye Cole, the gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the March 2023 general polls.
Yet, given the circumstances preceding Fubara’s victory at the Supreme Court, the poetic justice is widely associated with a scenario which is different from Cole’s appeal against him. Rather it is in respect of the new level in the fight against Fubara by Nyesom Wike, the immediate past governor of the state and now the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. Seemingly goaded by a sense of entitlement, Wike along with his co-travelers, had been bellyaching over what they see as the play-out of ingratitude by Fubara, for their efforts in making him governor.
Admittedly, it is difficult to discount the pivotal role played by Wike as then incumbent governor of Rivers State in manipulating Fubara‘s chances to become his preferred successor as governor of the state. In fact, at the emergence of Fubara as Wike’s likely successor during the electioneering campaigns in 2023, the fear was rife across the entire Rivers State that Fubara’s success as governor would translate into a Third Term agenda for Wike. This was in reference to the constitutional absurdity of Wike continuing in running the affairs of the Rivers State after serving for two successive terms a governor between 2015 -2019 and 2019 -2023.
So insidious has been the enterprise of Wike’s camp against Fubara that several acts of undisguised sabotage against the latter were executed and which eventually attracted public sympathy for and subsequent protests in support of Fubara. First was the sudden but abortive impeachment initiative of the governor by the Rivers State House of Assembly (RSHA) in October last year under its hitherto Speaker Martins Amewhule. Up to the time of writing this piece, hardly has any significant hint of Fubara’s sins which justify the impeachment move against him, has been availed the general public by the RSHA. All the public is allowed to run with is that the impeachment move was at the instance of Wike in order to punish Fubara.
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Soon after the impeachment move failed, the members of the RSHA passed several motions mostly to misdirect their statutory powers as a state legislature from addressing themselves to the numerous development challenges facing the state, to the parochial venture of undermining the authority of Fubara as the governor. When that seemed to prove ineffective in disorienting Fubara, 27 out of 32 members of the RSHA followed up with a mass defection from their erstwhile political party PDP, to the opposition APC. Ever since, the legality of this development has been swirling in the country’ political and legal circles, given the sacred position of the law that legislators who defect from their political parties to any other without a subsisting crisis and spilt in their former parties, stand to lose their positions in office.
As if the foregoing is not enough, the defecting legislators of the RSHA (whose number has reduced to 25) had been holding plenary sessions and using the media to inundate the unsuspecting public with semblances of them at work even in the face of blatant breaches of the law. In fact, for several weeks and even up to the early hours of that Thursday of the Supreme Court ruling, the entire Rivers State was enveloped in a cloud of mixed fortunes featuring expectations of good tidings for the embattled governor for some, and even trepidation for others. This was just because along the streets of the state, the Supreme Court judgment was feared to go either way – for or against Fubara.
And who would blame anybody among the teeming masses in the state who are not privy the hallowed processes of the courts, but were preyed upon by the governor’s traducers to his discredit, by feeding fears of his likely removal and the onset of unpalatable turbulence in the state. Willy nilly, their campaign was to sustain in the public space the image of Wike as super powerful and deserving of Fubara’s unquestioned subservience.
Hopefully the Supreme Court has come as a welcome dispensation that will reset the political equation in the state. For now the status is that Fubara remains the lawful governor of the Rivers State until 2027 in the first instance and all things being equal. In that context, even as politics in the state had been sullied by the protracted tussle for control of the state was launched by Nyesom Wike against Fubara’s incumbency, to the extent that the latter was literally emasculated in the conduct of his official functions as governor, it is time to let Fubara be.
Wike should not only accept the state of affairs but also congratulate his successor as well as consider sheathing the sword, and join in the rebuilding of the state. For the victory is not only for Fubara, but all of Rivers State and Nigeria’s democracy.
So it is for now.
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