Rivers is to Wike what Lagos is to Tinubu

Some men are born blessed, others work for their own blessing while others gingerly walk up to theirs. For 61-year-old Ezenwo Nyesom Wike, it is better to walk to blessing.

Wike left the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, with a degree in law. Although he went to law school to complete the journey, he had no intention of ending up as a charge-and-bail lawyer. When opportunity presented itself, he returned to school for a master’s in political administrative studies. He registered a business probably as a backup plan because it was political office that attracted him more than anything. His first shot at it was becoming the chairman of Obio-Akpor Local Government Area of Rivers State. By the time you could address him as honourable Chairman, he had transformed into a short-term replacement of a minister of the federal republic.

If you followed the route of Nasir El-Rufai who had the misfortune of being asked to bribe his way into becoming a minister, that is a long jump, not a long-distance run. It wasn’t long before ambition propelled Wike to contest as governor. For political weaklings, all these could have been a stubborn gamble, but Wike knew that fate favours those who walk up to it. He placed a bet and won a queen becoming the sixth governor of Rivers State.

Apparently Wike belongs to the Jagaban school of politics with the motto – leave office but never leave power. From Babangida to Akpabio, this principle always works. It’s why, even as an unimpeachable member of the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Wike remains a serving member of the All-Progressives Congress (APC) government under Bola Ahmed Tinubu. As the grand lord of the FCT, Nyesom Wike is a powerful minister-governor.

You read that right, because Wike is an obedient man, obedient to his own rules. Seeing his tenure coming to an end, Wike sabotaged his party’s rule on zoning by throwing his hat in the presidential race and while he ran a strident campaign, he lost to Atiku Abubakar, a political juggernaut of sorts. However, Wike refused to tow party line. He openly opposed his party’s choice and recruited three other rebel governors to join the mutiny. For reasons that would ever baffle political pundits, the party could do nothing about Wike. This level of rebellion must have either made an impression on Tinubu or scared him. Both men were on opposite camps, but Tinubu nominated him as minister and ensured, unlike El-Rufai that Wike scaled through.

This is what the late Pa MB Asaju meant when he famously said that a witch is an asset as a wife, a dictum which he refused to live by. Again, if you ask El-Rufai, once the occupier of Wike’s present position, Tinubu felt comfortable with Wike in his cabinet than outside of it.

Identical twins are proof that it is not always that opposites attract. For even as grand Lord of Nigeria, Tinubu has his stamp of authority on Lagos which he first governed. His imprimatur hangs on Lagos politics like a sharpened sword of Damocles. Every succeeding Lagos governor goes to Bourdillon to kiss the ring. Ambode, the only governor to call the bluff of the grand master, had his political wings and future ambition clipped and blocked.

Lately, Mudashiru Obasa, Lagos speaker and a Tinubu boy, was ousted in a majority-led palace coup. His deputy, Mojisola Meranda, was installed in his stead while Obasa was abroad on vacation with only four loyal members on his roll. Obasa returned, huffed, puffed and staged a recollection of position victory lap after every pundit had written his premature epitaph. Weeks after Meranda appeared to have settled to the sweet call as Madam Speaker, her reign came to a premature stop when Obasa reclaimed his mandate as speaker-for-life.

In the case of Nyesom Wike, who thought he found an ally in Siminalayi Fubara, his accountant-general facing political extinction with a slew of corruption allegations hung on his smooth neck succeeded him as governor. Like Wike, Fubara was pregnant with ambition, but as they say, he did not master the ropes before he started swinging.

Thinking that majority votes or unchallenged rigging plus swearing an oath of office makes you all-powerful, Fubara rose prematurely to dismantle his predecessor’s impregnable political wall. He hit rock bottom with every attempt because 24 members of the state assembly he inherited remained unflinchingly loyal to Wike. They stonewalled every move Fubara made.

Fubara was so furious at one time that he forgot that in Nigeria, wherever lawmakers choose to meet with the mace or sometimes a replica of it is lawful sitting. For in a mad rage Fubara, an accountant accessed the state assembly complex, declared it unfit for habitation and ordered his bulldozers to bring it down. He thought it would be as effective as prorogation of the assembly, but it failed.

The Wike fortified members went to court to challenge all the executive moves against them and at one time, they decided to resign en masse from the ruling PDP but kept fighting to pull down the governor and his structures. Fubara latched on to the legal principle of precedent which had at several times pronounced that elected political office holders who decamp before the end of their tenure automatically lose their seats. He forgot that Wike is a lawyer who knows that some court decisions are made per incuriam, meaning that they could not be cited as precedent. Fubara is an accountant, but Wike is a lawyer and a political scientist stamping his own footprints on jurisprudence.

Earlier in the crisis, Fubara ran to Aso Rock believing that Tinubu would put a leash on his political rottweiler. The president worked out a truce, but like the Biblical King Rehoboam, Fubara adhered to the counsel of the youthful Ahitophels in his cabinet believing it would calm things down. As an accountant, Fubara is unaware of the transience of pyrrhic victories in running the affairs of a government with wealth vast enough to pilot the affairs of some of Nigeria’s neighbouring states. True enough, the courts made a per incuriam clause that has now forced Fubara to sit with one lobe of his buttocks.

The renegade assemblymen are back in reckoning, all interim decisions, including rash elections, the state budget passed by loyalists without scrutiny are now invalidated by the courts. Defectors are playing with Fubara the way children pull the yoyo game. When it pleased them, they issued ultimatums and before Fubara could comply, they went on recess for doing nothing and at public expense.

As for Wike, he has sacked his infamous praise-singing live band for a replica Hitler moustache, manipulating events from Abuja, showing a rookie how the game is played, unfazed about turning the state into an ethnic cauldron.

Ethnic warlords, political groups and different insurgents have pitched camps, waiting for the bugle of war to sound. They have threatened Nigeria’s economy warning Tinubu of more battles in addition to the ones his army is unsuccessfully fighting. In Nigeria, shame is not a virtue, and all is fair to become a godfather, even the shedding of innocent blood. The prayer of patriots remain – may Nigeria succeed.