Rotimi Fasan
Seventy-two hours after he returned to office following a six-month suspension, Siminalayi Fubara, the Governor of Rivers State, was with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on a thank-you visit. Looking chastised and sobre, Mr. Fubara told reporters that he had made peace with his principal and was ready to move Rivers State forward. He has made it clear that he is grateful to the President for the way he resolved the issues between him, Nyesom Wike and the Martins Amaewhule-led State Assembly.
After the President announced the end of emergency rule in Rivers State last Wednesday, there was worry among Nigerians, especially supporters of Mr Fubara about his whereabouts. He had failed to report in the state. Those who were not satisfied with the way the issue between Wike and Fubara was resolved, those who chafed at the apparent capitulation of Fubara, probably thought his failure to show up in the state 24 hours after he was restored to office signified another phase in his fight with his godfather and the President. Tinubu seemed to have sided with Wike, not Fubara.
Given how they had tried to stoke the fire of disagreement, goaded Fubara into rebellion but failed to turn the state into a flashpoint of crisis, the false advisers could not bear to see their enemies in Abuja appearing to kick dust in their eye. Fubara couldn’t just let things end that way. He sure must have something up his sleeves. They must have been sorely disappointed when by mid-day on Friday, Fubara landed in Port Harcourt to the warm embrace of his supporters. His open but measured praise of the President couldn’t have gone unnoticed. They rolled their eyes in disgust and some of them called the governor names. Perhaps, because they realised they had no buffer for Fubara against what hit him, sidelining him for six full months without they, his Job Comforters, being able to raise a finger, they kept their counsel.
They wrote Fubara off as a lame duck governor, a snake that has been defanged. This was, again, a backhand way of provoking him into the kind of precipitate action that made him play into the hands of his godfather and the Abuja power establishment. Fubara stayed cool and unprovoked. Saturday, Sunday he tried to pick up from where he left off and started with a visit to the church. There he repeated his desire for peace and readiness to move on. By Monday, he was in Abuja to see the President. It was in the circumstances the right thing for him to do even though it portrayed him as pliant and remorseful. Wike has himself tried to be gracious in his utterances and steered off making any controversial remark about the situation in Rivers.
Fubara has been dignified in a situation where he has come across as the underdog. That is only for a while. In a short time, nobody would remember he was backed into a corner only recently. He needs to play his game right this time and he appears to be doing just that- if his meddlesome advisers out to fight a proxy war with Wike and Tinubu would let him be. He could have chosen to quietly resume work in Port Harcourt without visiting the president who probably cut short his work leave to proclaim the end of emergency rule in Rivers. But that would have showed him as defiant and, perhaps, still displeased. While that would have warmed the hearts of the do-gooders in Port Harcourt and elsewhere, it would probably be noticed elsewhere, setting the stage for another roasting by his political adversaries.
His visit to the president, however, erased any doubt that he was ready to work in the spirit of whatever agreement the president brokered. This was, however, all too much for the opposition, including a particular Lagos-based broadcast station whose anchors often operate like the media office of the Labour Party candidate in the 2023 presidential election. The inveterate “fact-checker” among them has been inconsolable in the last two days. They have taken every opportunity to lament about the content of the so-called agreement Fubara purportedly reached with Wike. Their undisguised pain and complaint only show why journalists or those who pretend to be journalists should control their bias and moderate their emotional investment in the affairs of political actors. There is a limit to partisanship which some of these so-called on-air personalities fail to comprehend. It doesn’t have to but it has become a learning curve they must overcome for their views to gain the moral purchase they strain to project to the world.
They spent much of their time in the “What’s trending” section of their programme to deliver harsh broadsides against Bola Tinubu. As riotous as this section of the programme has become, the anchors were all of one accord as they struggled to outshine and outspeak one another. They all seemed to have slept and faced the same direction with their unquestioning uptake of Nasir el-Rufai’s sour grape attack of a government and a man he could have killed for until he was outsmarted by the owners of a game he thought he knew how to play. Why should any responsible person take El-Rufai serious at these times? He is a political salesman, bruised sore and limping but still looking for those who will sing the chorus of his new hymn against Tinubu: a term elongation, even lifetime presidency, for a man yet in the middle of his first term in office. Isn’t this a case of paranoia taken too far?
Is Bayo Onanuga wrong with his advice to Governor Uba Sani about this Malam’s mental state? The next time he visits the Turaki Adamawa, a man under whom he cut his teeth in politics but who shortly after became his worst enemy and, indeed, toothpick, to borrow a local parlance- shouldn’t El-Rufai be held down and quietly returned to his house when next he embarks on one of these types of visits to spread his end-time warnings? Yet, it is a song from one such visits that this weekday morning quartet chose rather uncritically to sing a few hours ago. At what point does scaremongering stop and responsible editorialising begin? How much longer must Nigerians bear this chaff being daily vended as political insight by opposition elements that have abdicated their role to trade in urban legends and hearsay?
Why are some journalists and political players mourning and sobbing over Fubara’s supposed loss of power more than the bereaved himself? Where were then when Wike handpicked Fubara and Fubara rode on his coattails through the electoral process that produced him as governor? How does the logic of godfatherism suddenly elude these “meddlesome interlopers”?
Vanguard
