Category: autopost

The duel between Nyesom Wike and Sim Fubara recalls the episode between Napoleon and a Russian envoy. Master craftsman Leo Tolstoy waxed it into a legend in the most ambitious of all novels, War and Peace. Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte dropped a handkerchief in front of the Russian ambassador and expected the envoy to pick it up. In irony, the Russian dropped his own handkerchief beside Napoleon’s and picked his own fabric. The French general stooped, in spite of his fabled swagger of a hat and his imperial majesty, to retrieve his piece of cloth. Fubara thinks his handkerchief is whiter, lacier than Wike’s. But Wike is the haberdasher.

Fubara is in such a satiric contempt of his former boss and benefactor. In his wry mood, Wike must be wondering why Fubara is in such a wry mood. The drama is unfolding so fast, few have enough time for context. The fight is in several incarnations: between godfather and godson, benefactor and beneficiary, gratitude and disdain, Ijaw versus Wike, FCT versus lawmakers versus executive. In this fight, law has fallen hostage to the sophistry of SANs. Are the defecting assembly men leaping in the dark, or are they lurking to pluck down the governor?

There may be a failure of definition here. Maybe Fubara was never born as Wike’s son while Wike thought himself a father, an obstetric upheaval, a new oedipal twist. Not like Kwankwaso and Ganduje, Chime and Nnamani, Ibori and Okowa, Akpabio and Emmanuel, Kalu and Orji, et al. Which model is Fubara re-enacting? Psycho-social pundits may classify Fubara’s act. Is it an imitation, adaptation or parody of previous father-son lock-horns? Others have said, it took a year, sometimes three years, before the godson cut off the umbilical cord. Street roar, boardroom brawl, a slap in the face, a menace from hirelings, which?

Fubara does not fit any model. It is not even Chime versus Nnamani. Before his investiture, Chime had invoked the holy spirit to arrest Enugu State House demons while Nnamani still inhabited the palace. Fubara denies any cord or accord. Fubara model is a parody. If others waited, he had no patience. If Chime threatened, Fubara’s lips were still. Even if it took three months before the blood spill between them, the quarrel must have started three months earlier.

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Given the gale of resignations, the bulldozer’s rumble, the stealthy coalitions, yaps of protests, we may say Fubara’s is new, a virgin clearing. Even in the perpetual tumult of Rivers State politics, it is a virgin clearing. But each of them is fighting and hurting, and are, in the words of French Poet Baudelaire, “I am the wound and yet the blade.”

Fubara is denying the Wike DNA. After denying the political bloodline, other links are easy to cut. He can say he is no beneficiary because the people, not Wike, voted him in. His is not disdain because he is now governor and Wike is not. Yes, it is an Ijaw matter because he is the first in the Fourth Republic to mount the chair. Wike gave and he is trying to take it away. This thinking is the making of Fubara’s delusion of grandeur.

If he has a grudge, there is a right way to be right and a right way to be wrong. His is a wrong way to be right. Even when we are right, we don’t have to be right. That is the life of good breeding and maturity. Fubara lacks it. You don’t blast an edifice costing billions to advertise your piety.

The issue is that once in power, it is easy to become the power itself. That is the problem with men like Fubara, who played the obsequious buffoon while he followed Wike around during the campaigns. He was bidding his time. That is the cynic at play, the quiet, grasping power monger. He thinks himself a liberator, a revolutionary even. He is the one who is going to bring down the mighty man of valour. He sees himself at once as a hero and rebel, who would, in the words of Albert Camus in The Rebel, “die on one’s feet (rather) than live on one’s knees.”

What is at stake is not Wike or Fubara, but democracy. At the moment, it is a question of power. Many are saying Fubara is currying the Rivers street by playing the underdog. No one really knows the story. Some say it is money, but no evidence. Wike has denied it. Some say it is control of the state, but Wike says it is about the integrity of his political family. But Fubara has kept mum, and the Rivers street is apt to clutch at the commonplace narrative: that it is a bully hectoring a puppet. The absence of a good open brawl, with Wike jabbering and Fubara swiping back, has left the whole drama a fight without blows. The only idea next to democracy is Wike’s assertion that Fubara is dining with the enemy. In politics that is crime number one. Charles De Gaulle’s close friend and topflight novelist, Andre Malraux once wrote: “If you abandon a certain number of deputies or if they abandon you, that is an incident. If you abandon an idea, that is not an incident, it is a suicide.”

So, what is Fubara’s idea if not suicide, for he has abandoned the family that enthroned him. Perhaps hence the APC executive was dissolved, and the lawmakers who defected can now take their place in the new party. It is a realignment of forces. Fubara is giving shelter to malcontents, shelter of a leaky roof.

Some lawyers have said there is no crisis at the national level. They probably forgot that it is because he fought Atiku in the centre that the party in Rivers State was cut into two, with persons like Secondus and Atiku’s cronies on the other side. Major PDP players including governors in the party split the party. Fubara is a product of that maelstrom and Wike is in the centre of it. Let us be wary and let the court takes its course.

He has probably seen the end, and he may be eyeing the deep end. Illusion is a companion of power. He may see a bad end and may be heading inexorably towards it, like Oedipus. He may think himself a sort of Prometheus who brandishes a revolutionary torch. In his play on Prometheus, Aeschylus quotes him as saying, “No misfortune can fall upon me that I myself have not foreseen.”

Big events took place of late. One is the continuing raft of resignations. The second is the pulling down of the house legislature. The third is to sign a budget with four lawmakers. The four lawmakers’ scenario is a spillover from the Obj years of impunity. Obj amassed a few men to impeach governors. Fubara used it to commit a governor’s impeachable offence with the budget. He gives the impression of chaos. Fubara believes he is levitating himself as a man of destiny, out on a sacred mission. We saw that in the way he pulled down the house. He thinks he is pulling down a stronghold. But it may show he has no strong hold on power. He is probably thinking like the irreverent philosopher Nietzsche who wrote, “To raise a new sanctuary, a sanctuary must be destroyed. That is the law.” So, with all the trouble going on, he sees his act as what the sawdust Caesar of Italy, Benito Mussolini proclaimed, “the holy religion of anarchy.”  It consumed him. Fubara should not see himself in the mould of Napoleon, who crowned himself and wife Josephine in Rome. He then declared, “God gave me this crown. Let anyone who touches it beware.” He lost it all at Waterloo. His head defiled crown and could not hold it.

Reno Omokri tweeted that the crisis in Rivers State contrasts that of Ondo State as mirror of cultural differences. He may be right if we take away the Wetie and Agbekoya affairs. But the southwest state has handled it with tact while the Rivers State has been a quicksand.

The Rivers State crisis also reminds us that political turmoil sometimes does not involve the masses. They look on and take sides. While the streets yelp, the solution lies with democracy’s puppeteers, in the halls of courts and the intrigues of big men. It is a feline hour, and the schemes of men and cat often rhyme. That is what is unfolding.

So, Fubara should be wary of stacking up impeachable offences. Or else, the bringing down of the house may begin the obsequies of his reign.