With both parties likely to return within six months, I can’t think of a less painful alternative
It is now over two weeks since President Bola Tinubu declared state of emergency in Rivers State. Expectedly, virtually everybody with something to say must have spoken, and those of us now commenting on it have more than enough materials for research, including comments from armchair critics, motor park analysts and pepper-soup joints commentators.
President Tinubu declared the emergency on March 18 and it was ratified by the National Assembly the next day.
Coming at a time that everybody was looking in the direction of Governor Siminalayi Fubara’s impeachment, the emergency was a master stroke. We all knew how heated the polity was in the state even after last month’s Supreme Court judgment affirming the Martins Amaewhule-led house of assembly as the authentic legislators in the state. The governor had been working with only four legislators, claiming that since the Amaewhule-led faction had decamped from the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), they had, ipso facto, lost their seats in the assembly. The apex court ruled otherwise and that threw spanners in virtually every action the governor had taken with the concurrence of the four legislators. It also stopped disbursement of funds to the state until it was ready to deal with the legislators recognised by the apex court.
I had warned in my first piece on the crisis on March 9, titled ‘Fubara’s humble pie’, that those who start wars can only know the beginning; nobody can tell its end; so the political gladiators had to be careful.
I doubt if any of them envisaged where they have all landed now. The governor had abused his powers severally while the dispute lasted and the legislators felt now that they had been vindicated by the Supreme Court judgment, they too should demand their pound of flesh, probably more, from their oppressor-in-chief.
The legislators were looking in the direction of using their powers to impeach the governor and everything seemed primed for that when suddenly, the president pulled the rug off the feet of both parties. Now, they have to go and rest for six months in the first instance, in line with the provision of the emergency.
I hate scheming but I doff my hat for whoever came up with the emergency as panacea to cool down the polity in the state. The alternative would have been bloody.
Of course, it was expected that there would be divergent opinions on this, but, in all honesty, I don’t know if there is a better alternative in the circumstance.
To be fair, there are those who genuinely feel concerned that we should be wary of giving the president too much powers in addition to the one he has because he is a human being. This concern is apt. If anything, we always have to be guided by the wise saying that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
However, I have come to see that many of those criticising the emergency are doing so either for the sake of being seen to be politically correct, or for ulterior motives. We should not lose sight of the fact that there were some people waiting in the wings for the impeachment processes to gather steam or get concluded (if it would ever be, realising that that, in the first place, was one of the causes of rancour between the governor and the legislators).
Some people profit from the kind of anarchy that would have attended the impeachment or even its mere kick-off.
So far, none of the critics of the emergency has advanced any convincing alternative beyond the emotive argument of an elected president ‘removing’ an equally elected governor. Yet, the presidency has made it clear that both the executive and the legislature are only on suspension. Second, with the approval of the state of emergency by the National Assembly, it is no longer a situation of an elected president asking an elected governor to ‘go away’.
No doubt, what was playing out in Rivers was potentially dangerous, not only for the state but the country at large, and no government worth its salt would wait and watch until the crisis snowballed out of control. Let’s remember that security of lives and property is the first duty of any government.
Many of those now crying foul over the emergency would have ended up blaming the Federal Government if it had allowed the crisis to degenerate beyond the level it was before the proclamation of emergency. This is evident, especially in a country where we politicise virtually everything. The opposition is forever waiting in the wings for the government to make mistake so they can have job to do. As far as the opposition is concerned, whatever the government did right must have been a mistake (to paraphrase a colleague).
Apparently the government was guided by this aspect of our national life, hence its decision to do what seemed to it to be the needful on the Rivers State crisis, knowing that head or tail, it would be criticised.
One way of knowing that many of those criticising the government now are doing so for purely personal or political reasons is to ask what they did when Governor Fubara was serially trampling upon the law. Was mum not the word from them when the governor destroyed the state house of assembly building for the sole purpose of averting impeachment, which is the legitimate prerogative of the state assembly? How many of them cautioned him that under no circumstance could he have been doing lawful business with only four out of 31 members of the state assembly? How could someone in all rational sense of it say a state budget running into billions of naira could be approved by that number of legislators? Even if people were deceiving Fubara and the dance-on-we are solidly-behind-you orchestra was singing his praise while committing those illegalities, he ought to have known that those actions were as good as building on shifting ground. You cannot build something on nothing. Fubara built something on nothing; hence, first, the Supreme Court judgment that put an end to those shenanigans, and then the state of emergency that came to ensure that the apex court judgment did not become a nullity; that it be given meaning so that governors generally can know the limits of their ’emperorship’.
True, there is an urgent need to put an end to gubernatorial rascality in the country. Fubara exhibited the tendencies of many governors, past or present. The tell-tale signs are all over the place. He was travelling down the lane of impunity at more than the speed of light. He needed to be stopped before other governors saw him as a model. With only five governors travelling along that trajectory, it is only a matter of time for Nigeria to become a huge Banana Republic.
A governor who believed and indeed said that the legislature exists at his pleasure in a democratic setting really should not be there. He should first go for tutorials on the concept of separation of powers.
A governor who pulled down the building of his state house of assembly ostensibly to stave of impeachment is like someone who conjured rain to fall only to start complaining about the accompanying thunderstorm. He may not have bargained for the thunderstorm but that is part of the package that could accompany rain.
With Fubara’s experience, governors would start thinking twice before destroying state assembly buildings for the simple reason that they want to deny the legislators the right of impeaching them. Maybe Fubara would not have travelled that route if those who did it before him had been made to face the consequences. Such actions are condemnable. It is just that ours is a country where citizens are too casual about issues of governance, especially at the local and state government levels, whereas these are the closest tiers of government with direct bearing to their daily lives, and whose activities should therefore be of utmost concern to them.
But everybody is concentrating on the centre. That is one of the reasons why many governors have become emperors and can wake up from the wrong side of the bed and commit blue murder and go scot-tree.
So, is there no word for Nyesom Wike, Fubara’s predecessor and former godfather, now Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), in all of these?
I have never been a politician, so I may not know how it feels for a successor that someone installed to want to be a man only after he had stooped to conquer, or to get power. But then, I know Wike and Fubara’s case is not the first and it would not be the last.
People will tell you it is the failure or refusal of Fubara to do Wike’s bidding that caused their fight. At least, this is the summary of what is in the public domain, even if it might be pregnant with other meanings and insinuations.
So, that has been why a whole state had to be on auto pilot, with the people’s fate hanging in the air?
It may be true that Fubara practically snubbed presidential intervention on the matter but then the FCT minister too did not help matters with his caustic and inflammatory utterances.
And, as if to confirm this, even as the minister is still chewing the Rivers crisis in his mouth, one of his aides was only a few days ago reported to have said that Wike would yet again abort Abubakar Atiku’s presidential ambition come 2027! Haba! Honourable minister, are you ‘Olodumare’ (God)? If you are not, why talking like Him?
Back to Fubara because this is essentially about him. How could he have withheld the state legislators’ pay for over a year and expect that mere writing to inform them of his intention to present the budget or transact business with them would do? We are talking of human beings with flesh and blood here, not inanimate objects. And, to think that this was not an act of grace or penitence, but something done under compulsion!
The governor missed the point big time, and, for me, it merely tells that he was yet to learn the appropriate lessons that he could not ride roughshod over the state legislature.
All said, it is hoped that the six months suspension on both the executive and legislative arms of government in Rivers would be sufficient to let both sides decide whether they still want to remain relevant in the state’s political affairs or they want to fight to the finish.
But the onus rests more on Fubara to come down from his high horse because he must have known the difference between being a sitting governor and a governor serving a six-month suspension term, even if in the comfort of his home.
In Nigeria, ‘governor na enjoyment’. Something several shades sweeter than the ‘mudun mudun’ that the late Governor Abiola Ajimobi talked about.
