By Rotimi John
The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, has said that the details
The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, has said that the details
In Nigeria, there are thousands and thousands of her citizens who cherish their own little assemblage of bad-natured commentaries. They prefer a malicious quip to an uplifting thought or idea. They are inscrutably petulant, infectiously irritable, and sickeningly sentimental.
Thankfully, a small band of truly civilised personages continues to demand that scurrilous diatribes be redeemed by wit, grace and style in the use of language.
Nyesom Wike, a two-term governor of oil-rich Rivers State and controversial Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, typifies the full range of the use of bitter or abusive anecdotes, irreverent doggerel and pompous incivility in the Nigerian public communication space. Curiously, he is lavishly enjoyed and ceremoniously courted, even by the media, for his infinitely nuisance value.
The absence of elegance and the general lack of appreciation of the nuances of the communication arts have combined to make a virtue of Wike’s soulless and depressingly hollow trifles. Wike’s audience, for the most part, is utterly destitute of the requirement of the intellectual conditions of the institutions of public life.
An expectedly precarious co-existence or shared values of Wike and his god-son, Governor Siminalayi Fubara, in the Rivers State political firmament, has provided a currently-trending depressing national sport. That the duo’s projected assimilation has not endured is no new discovery; it is not rocket science to discern. It is nothing more than a short chapter in Karma’s eternal playlist.
Fubara is not meant to hold opinions, he can only express sentiments. King Wike, on the other hand, is to reign consistent with the full amplitude of that usage; and to rein in any departures – real or imagined – from the ground rules. By reason of the divine right of a king, Wike is to superintend the affairs and events of Rivers State from the political cockpit of his Abuja mayoral office.
Reputedly, Wike’s mind has a talent for making no mistakes but the very greatest. He has himself recounted a plethora of errors of judgement he has made in his choice of persons into juicy political offices. His alleged patriotic feelings have been bruised or trampled upon many times even as his choices have turned out to be his Archiles heels each time.
Wike has, for instance, helped President Tinubu to perfect his conception of a one-party system by literally arresting the growth and development of Nigeria’s leading official opposition party where he held a primus position and was deemed untouchable. Satisfied that he had completed the assignment, Wike expected a triumphant welcome into the president’s political party by way of a special invitation. He could not understand or countenance Fubara’s ambushing which manifested in the latter’s no. 001 status in the All Progressives Congress (APC) register in Rivers State. Wike had been cleverly bidding his time to join the APC at the right psychological moment. That moment now appears eternally postponed or vanquished.
In the prelude to the present state of unease, Fubara had ignorantly ignored Rudyard Kipling’s (1865-1936) insightful admonition regarding an uneven relationship with a puzzlingly-difficult person:
“Make ye no truce with Adam-zad – the bear that walks like a man”.
Wike had dubiously exacted an agreement from Fubara: he would not seek a second term in office. Wike’s suffocation of Fubara was stifling. It is indecorous too.
Fubara did what Wike had thought impossible. He defected to the APC and secured for himself the position of primus interpares among the party’s leadership. He became the leader of the APC in Rivers State by virtue of his office as governor. He thereby became the cynosure of all eyes; the one whose primary responsibility will be to deliver the people of Rivers State into the vote-hungry hands of Tinubu. By just one act of the possible, Fubara has demolished the much-touted Wike mystique.
True to his character, Wike will not take the open assault on his sovereignty with equanimity or philosophic aplomb. He has since been shouting himself hoarse – issuing ultimatums and threatening everyone including party officials. He has even sworn a thinly-veiled retaliatory comeuppance for Tinubu himself. He spoke cathedral on behalf of Rivers State.
APC, he warned sternly, should not take the support of Rivers State for Tinubu’s 2027 presidential bid for granted. Wike sounds maudlin like someone who has been brought to his knees irretrievably. Old things appear to have passed away; all things have become new. Wike today is like tired-sounding cymbals. He has held the highest number of “official” press conferences since the turn of this 4th Republic – just to impinge his persona on public consciousness.
It has been insightfully suggested that the hand we are seeing in this epic melodrama in Rivers State is the hand of Alhaji Ajibola Bashiru, the National Secretary of the APC who has been saddled with the responsibility of cutting Wike to size. The voice we are hearing has been correctly identified as Tinubu’s. The combined effect of the hand and voice is to clip Wike’s overgrown wings.
Today, Wike will by procedure queue behind Fubara in matters respecting Rivers State. Unable to dispense with Wike lightly without being perceived as ungrateful, Tinubu has deviously used Fubara to take the shine off Wike’s self-acclaimed political leadership of Rivers State or even of the South-South geo-political zone. The Yoruba people have always identified the primacy of the brain over sheer brawn. They say in near-transcendental intuition, “Ogbon j’agbara lo.” Even as it is said that there is no shame in partisan political practice, Wike is expected to privately lick his wounds while exploring fresh plots for accessing Tinubu for a repositioning.
Tinubu is infinitely enjoying the circus show – applauding his avowed political brinkmanship. With one deft masterstroke, Fubara has helped to popularise Tinubu’s self-satisfied sense of urbanity for pulling the strings of mischief or intrigues from a closet without being associated with the consequences. Tinubu’s ambivalence or outright indifference to what truly is concerning appears to have been poignantly foreshadowed in the outstanding wit of Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) which he spoke to Sir Arthur Sullivan:
“He is like a man who sits on a stone and then complains that his backside is burning”.
The indomitable human spirit has throughout the ages fortified men to prefer to suffer rather than subordinate their allegiance to some totemic figure falsely claiming to represent the fictive authority of the state. Freedom to abide by one’s spirit or inclination is one of the enduring manifestations of that struggle.
The idea of loyalty or of majority correctness is reduced to an absurdity as we subsume our God-given conscientious objection capability to some unqualified allegiance to some notional or ill-defined ideas that are themselves inconsistent with the will and purpose of our natural ordination.
Conscientious objection must continue to be a protected right under the law and the Constitution. The conscientious objector must be applauded and canonised not villified or run out of town.
We conclude this otherwise long essay with a short story in the form of an admonition from Aesop: The Complete Fables (Penguin Classics 1998 p. 155). It is a short story about the Lion and the Wild Ass.
A lion and a wild ass entered into an agreement to hunt wild beasts together. The lion was to use his great strength while the ass will make use of his greater speed. When they had taken a certain number of animals, the lion divided the spoils into three portions.
“I’ll take the first share because I am the king”, he said. “The second share will be mine because I have been your partner in the chase”, he said.
“As for the third share”, he said to the wild ass, “this share will be a great source of harm to you, believe me, if you do not yield it up to me. And by the way, get lost!”
The lesson of the story must not be lost on us. It is to the effect that it is always suitable to calculate one’s own strength, and not to enter into an alliance with people stronger than we can cope with.
John, a lawyer and commentator on public affairs, is theDeputy Secretary General of Afenifere.
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