The political chase game has started once more in Rivers State. The battle of wits and resources has taken off. The gladiators are striving, scheming and strategizing. The stakes are high; so high and so fiercely contested. The takes are good, though not oft talked about. The hall is crowded, so crowded and so full of characters – great and distinguished men; men of character and some men of questionable means; charlatans and all manner of pretenders. The chessboard is no less rowdy, capricious and tempestuous. The game is played more by unseen than seen hands. It is the battle of the spirits and the willing. It is the clash of the titans and the battle lines have been drawn between Transport Minister and former Rivers Governor, Rotimi Amaechi, and his successor, Governor Nyesom Wike. Ahead of next Saturday’s rerun elections, both men have been trading insults, invectives and casting banal aspersions at each other. The shouting match has been needlessly fierce, untidy, unsparing and generally divisive. This macabre dance must therefore stop in the interest of peace and stability.
Amaechi fired the first salvo when, in a radio broadcast, he accused Wike of desperation to take over the Rivers state government for the sole purpose of stealing public funds. He said Wike had become so desperate he could even sacrifice his mother. “People still want me back as governor. I will be here till the March 19 re-run election; let’s see what Wike can do. Let’s face it man to man,” Amaechi charged. In his response laced with harmful grandiloquence, Wike described Amaechi as a failed governor who needed urgent psychiatric evaluation and treatment. According to Wike, Amaechi lacks proper parental upbringing. He called Amaechi a monstrously corrupt politician, saying Amaechi failed in his eight years as Rivers governor, adding that only a man with psychiatric disorder will compare his failed eight years in office to just eight months of the new administration.
The current face-off between Amaechi and Wike, and by extrapolation, the Presidency and Rivers State, is most embarrassing to both men not only for the name-calling; indecorous as it is, but they belittle their high offices and diminish their personality as well as Nigerians, more so, as the verbal altercation is lacking in vital attributes of political tolerance and democratic engagement. Either way, both men operated on the cheap; their petulance and foul temperament diminished their public standing, and they embarrassed themselves and Rivers State even more than they embarrassed the nation, with conduct unbecoming of the high offices they hold.
It is worth-noting that the security situation in Rivers, in the build up to the re-run elections, has been a thing of concern to the leadership of security agencies in the country. This is against the backdrop of the spate of murder cases, abduction, kidnapping and other negative vices, suspected to be politically motivated, which have characterized the build-up to the re-run elections. As part of efforts to ensure hitch-free re-run elections, the Inspector-General of police Solomon Arase, (IG) has directed the deployment of 6000 regular Policemen, 14 units of anti-riot policemen, three commissioners of police and one AIG to Rivers state. Nigerians are apprehensive of the Gestapo tactics and the heavy militarization of the electoral process being employed by the administration; fearing that despite the change mantra of the ruling APC, the country seem to be suffering from the hang-over of do-or-die politics and is gradually receding to the transmutation trajectory of electoral contests marked by violence, ballot box stuffing and rigging which stifled democracy and brought shame upon the country.
Wike has accused the federal government of playing politics with security of lives and property in the State, claiming that pliant security operatives have been deployed with directives to rig the elections. The governor has urged the people to courageously defend their votes. The inability of the key actors to handle the situation in a civilized manner is a pointer to the abysmal level of the political leadership in the country and its immaturity. The situation is nothing but a manifestation of the deepening crisis of the culture of impunity devoid of maturity and tolerance that has held the country hostage for years. It is bewildering because this is happening under a supposedly democratic government controlled by the change-promising APC. Also, it is ironic because democracy is generally reputed to have inbuilt institutional mechanisms, both formal and informal, for addressing political differences and conflict of interests.
The current political crisis and reign of impunity in Rivers is another perfect illustration of Nigerian politicians’ warped sense of duty and their disrespect for democracy. Instead of concentrating on service to the people, the primary concern remains who is up that must be brought down or who is down that must be buried. In their obsession with partisan political supremacy, the only use to which Amaechi and Wike and their handlers put power is intrigues and vanities, sparing no thought for the people in whose trust the power is held.
President Buhari may not be directly involved but he cannot claim ignorance of the situation in Rivers. Some of his aides and known Abuja politicians actually flex muscles around like despots in the way they speak and operate like demi- gods. By not calling Amaechi to order, Buhari diminishes the presidency and gives vent to continuous executive lawlessness and high level official rascality and dubious unconstitutional devices to settle political scores with real or perceived enemies of his administration. Because of the awesome power and influence of the presidency to whom they are attached either as ministers, or presidential aide or mere sinecure and hangers-on, they ride rough-shod and do all they can to take control of state machinery from the governors. And when their arrogance and greed are backed by the federal might, the state government becomes crippled. This is the unenviable lot Rivers State is grappling with now; as it totters undeservedly under the weight of impunity.
Whereas, rule of law as an adjunct of democracy requires that state powers must be deployed only for the good of the people, and never as an instrument to settle scores with perceived enemies. With the coming of the APC, expectations of Nigerians were high. Against the background of the impunity of the past, they expected the rule of law, where all are equal before the laws of the land; against a tale of election rigging in the past, they expected that votes would count and those truly chosen by the people would emerge as leaders; against massive human rights violation, they expected the veneration of rights; against a history of assassinations even by the state, they expected to see respect for lives and dignity of man; against a background of poor social services, they expected to see working health centers, well-equipped schools, uninterrupted power supply and well-paved roads. With the political polarization and tension running high, these expectations will, at best, remain forlorn hopes in Rivers.
Buhari must arrest this trend urgently so that his government is not identified with impunity. Preserving order, peace and harmony is the highest objective of statecraft. There is enough cataclysm and wailings in the land to which there has been no solution or respite. The APC and PDP leaders need not open new terrains of chaos in Rivers. Whenever democracy is under assault, all well-meaning Nigerians of conscience must stand up and defend it. The time to rise in defence of democracy in Rivers is now!
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