NIRAN ADEDOKUN FROM PUNCH
President Bola Tinubu’s latest intervention in the political imbroglio in River State is statesmanlike.
No president of Tinubu’s political stature and sagacity would sit comfortably and watch a frontline state like Rivers go up in flames. This is not just due to the state’s economic significance but also to the potential impact a conflagration could have across the country. It is too risky, especially for a country already troubled on many fronts like Nigeria.
The economic considerations should become even more concerning for the president when some leaders of the Ijaw ethnic group are already sending signals of war. It is a frightening prospect that the country should avoid, but we shall return to the intervention of Ijaw interests shortly.
However, it is important to register that, at some point, political solutions, like the one Tinubu facilitated on Monday night, are needed to prevent the escalation of hostilities. If things go on the way they evolved, irrational actions by partisans could lead to anything, including a state of emergency. Nigeria cannot afford that at this time.
Yet, the president’s intervention is not devoid of certain absurdities. It started with media reportage of the truce. Virtually every headline suggested that President Tinubu had “directed” parties to take specific actions to resolve the mounting tension in the state. So, I wondered which part of the 1999 Constitution empowers the president to “direct” the governor and legislators of a state about how to conduct state affairs. Where does the President, or the meeting he presided over, derive the authority to “direct” the restoration of the River State House of Assembly members who willingly defected from the Peoples Democratic Party given that a court of law already endorsed the other faction comprising four members and that this faction had declared the seats of the defectors vacant? So, can the President, or anyone for that matter, restore them to office by fiat?
Beyond the constitutional issues, there are questions about the practicability of some decisions taken at the meeting.
For instance, how will the 10 members of the State Executive Council who resigned in solidarity with Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike (their benefactor), work harmoniously with Governor Siminalayi Fubara, whose confidence they have broken?
Would the 25 legislators the President “directed” to return to the House come back as members of the PDP or the All Progressive Congress, to which they claimed to have defected? Although, we do not have evidence that the legislators went through the complete constitutional process for political defection, in which case they may not have defected in fact.
If they return as members of the APC, how does a PDP governor function effectively with a legislature predominantly populated by people who tried to impeach him while they were in the same party, but now in a different party? Did Tinubu advise them to return to the PDP or is there a grand plan for everyone, including the governor to move to the APC?
It is a totally confounding situation because, with resolutions from that meeting, Fubara will end up working with two crucial but hostile groups. That is a State Executive Council and a legislature who walked out on him in favour of the man demanding his political life at the most important time. In essence, the President’s intervention may, if it has any effect at all, complicate rather than improve things.
But all of this reflects the state of politics and the failure of political processes in Nigeria. For the governor of a state and respected politicians like former Governor Peter Odili to march to the Presidential Villa in search of a solution to the altercation between Wike and Fubara is disgraceful and a desecration of the ideals of party politics. It reflects the mercantile disposition of Nigerian politicians and the weakening of the political parties.
If these political parties had ideologies, there would be discipline, such that members do not have to look up to the President for the resolution of conflicts at municipal, sub-national, and even national levels, even if the President, who has the more urgent responsibility of fixing the country, is a member of that party, not speak of a situation in which the PDP walked talked tail between legs to the seek solutions for an APC member.
For the record, conflicts between Wike and Fubara are not unusual in politics and even in life. Political parties should be able to deal with and reconcile all the centripetal and centrifugal forces around them. A political party is meant to cement society, bringing together all tendencies and uniting them through its ideology. Every political party should have a layer of structures, including an established process for conflict resolution such that contending forces do not bog the courts down with trivial party issues, as we see in Nigeria.
