Minister of State for Education, Nyesom Wike and Chairman of the Rivers State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Felix Obuah may soon become sworn enemies, it has been revealed.
It is believed that Wike, who heads the faction of the party led by Obuah, plans to dump the controversial chairman because he sees Obuah as a weak and cantankerous chairman.
According to a source close to the minister, Obuah is rated as too inexperienced and incompetent to play politics at the centre, and lacking finesse and charisma; and all these uncharitable ratings he may have validated with his recent pronouncement at Ahoada East during the inauguration of the Grassroots Development Initiative (GDI) that Wike “is the Rivers State governor-in-waiting.”
The pronouncement was greeted with an ovation but the source described the move as a plot to deceive prospective governorship aspirants into misconstruing the anti-Amaechi campaign for an effort in favour of President Goodluck Jonathan’s re-election bid. Also, the Presidency has since begun seeing Wike’s solidarity with Jonathan and his wife as his own way of pursuing the inordinate ambition of emerging the next governor and leaving the Ikwerres in power.
Sources at the Aso Rock Presidential Villa have revealed the belief in the Presidency that endorsing Wike will eventually leave the president in the bad books of his own Ijaw ethnic nationality, who desperately want to produce the next Rivers State Governor.
Already, the Ijaws in Rivers State, made up of the Kalabari, Okrikan, Andoni, Igbani(Bonny) and the Opobo are uniting in a bid to resist Wike’s imposition on the state. However, prominent Ijaw man, Alabo George Tamuno-Dagogo, a prominent Ijaw, believes Wike has no chance.
“It is now clear that the so-called opposition against Amaechi is for the interest of one man,” he said.
“He has deceived people to follow him in the plot to stop Amaechi at all cost while he is positioning himself to become governor. We now know better and we are going to resist him at all cost.”
With all these power play and the determination of the Ijaw and the Ogoni to stop Wike, the plan is to ease out Obuah from the chairmanship of the party, as it is now thought that Obuah was used to remove the former chairman, an Amaechi loyalist. The belief is that Obuah has outlived his usefulness, but how to discard him without disrupting the party’s structure is the major head ache now, especially as he might consider fighting back so that he would not go down alone.
There are equally fears that Obuah may eventually reconcile with Amaechi, who footed the bill for his South Africa trip for multiple surgeries when he suffered an attempted assassination in 2008. One of Obuah’s close friends has also said that Obuah who was once Chairman of Ogba/Egbema/ Ndoni Local Government feels beholden to Amaechi and may therefore eventually subvert Wike’s governorship aspirations. He also believes Wike may make a bad governor, considering his high-handedness during his tenures as Chairman of Obio/Akpor Local Government and National Chairman of Association of Local Governments of Nigeria (ALGON).
These permutations have left PDP fearing a capitulation if left in the hands of Obuah and Wike ahead of the 2015 presidential elections. More importantly, there are more than 2 million votes that the party and the Presiden
