Thirty-six years ago, in Providence, Rhode Island, I met Tito, a scrawny Italian with a scraggly beard and a resolute spirit. Working together in an automobile battery factory, Tito taught me the power of cooperative collaboration. He shared an Italian saying: “The world is so hard, a man must have two fathers to look after him, and that’s why they have godfathers.” What Tito said was true. A man’s gifts and talents may not see the light of day until he begins to ride on other peoples’ shoulders. These people become mentors and facilitators of good tidings.
Great mentors will sow into your life without an expectation of returns. The mean godfathers I call ‘pharaoh’ only need you to make bricks for them and without straws under hard labour. A man who finds himself leaning on the shrill shoulders of mean men will have his life roil up in turbid turmoil. But the shoulders of merciful men are swathed up with honey that brings about good treasures.
In this week’s treatise, I delve into the trending political squabble and turmoil in Rivers State between two powerful figures: current Governor Siminalayi Fubara and Federal Capital Territory minister, Nyesom Wike. While I have no stake in Rivers politics, it’s clear that godfatherism is a significant theme in Nigerian politics. It is the tone and tune of the murky terrain.
I am not certain how the paths of both men crossed. But we know that Fubara was once a Director of Finance and Accounts at the State Government House. Then he rose to the position of Permanent Secretary before becoming the Accountant General of Rivers State in 2020. For about a decade Fubara carried the bag of cash for Wike as the former governor’s money man. He was also his ‘yes’ man. The broad shoulders of godfather Wike later carried the young man into the governor’s mansion in Port Harcourt as a successor.
During the godfathering season, Fubara didn’t have to question why Wike wanted him to jump. He asked how high. Jumping jack Fubara is now tired of jumping. He wants to be his own man without any recourse to the political lightning rod godfather, and a man now accused of breathing down bigly and boisterously down the neck of a man in charge of one of the richest oil states in Nigeria. Wike obviously does not know that what men can do at any point in time is better determined when you give them money and power.
As of today, his son, Fubara, has both. Wike’s ‘‘sim” card played during the election is out of network. The choice of Sim as a successor was a subtle way of perpetuating the minister’s chokehold on Rivers’ bubbly cash base. His plan was to order and command the governor around at will like a male servant; telling him what to do, and how to disburse funds to cronies. That is what Nigerian political leaders do. They have no constitutional opportunity for a third term in office. Their prepackaged successors become their anthropomorphic extended stay in the purlieu of power. If this is not a perfect definition of upgraded greed, I wonder what it is.
But Wike has denied any attempt to remotely control the governor or his administration. Too many tales spewed out there on social media and you don’t know what to believe. In one of his many interviews and chats all around, Wike said that his grouse is the furtive dismantling of his political structures he bequeathed to his son. But this structure helps him maintain his political grip on Rivers. I think the Ikwere lion needs to be reminded that the boy he made a man also has his eyes on the future and wants to have his own place in history.
Fubara is judged a quiet fella. But watch out for quiet people. Many consider them very crafty; some say they are dangerous. In my opinion, they are people who always have their eyes on the ball. Quiet and ever-smiling personalities I’ve met know what they want, and they’ll do anything to have it. Wike is verbose, Fubara is taciturn. But this governor is not a fool. If Wike thought that the governor is a docile ‘sim’ card he could plug in and out of any network to do his bidding, the Abuja minister has another thing coming. That is what is playing out between father and son in Rivers today.
The presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the last election, Atiku Abubakar, and the party’s top apparatchiks are so excited right now that Fubara is not laying down and playing dead for Wike or anyone. I am certain that the governor gets his energy boost from them and from many bigwigs in the All Progressives Congress who detest the minister. Where do Rivers people stand in this duel? I have a decent knowledge about how they think. Rivers people are natural born PDP members. They have no shred of love for the ruling party. The abracadabra outcome of the last presidential election still angers them. They hate the idea that Wike is lying in the same political bed with Tinubu. Their desire is to get the state fully back home where they belong. And the PDP is home for them. In the daddy/son scuffle between Wike and Fubara, the sitting governor has the upper hand. He is loyal to the PDP, he has the cash tranche, and he who has the money has the men.
What must be going on in the head of President Bola Tinubu now? It is nothing but how a peaceful resolution can be facilitated. A friend suggested that the president would grant Wike the free will to platoon up the state, make it ungovernable for Fubara, declare a state of emergency, and then derail and dethrone Fubara as governor. If you think that is the response you will get from this president, you don’t know Tinubu.
Mr President will tread carefully. If he decides to run for re-election in 2027, we’ve got to wait until then. But for now, this president is thinking calmness and serenity in his domain and weighing his own political options too. For every politician, it’s always about the next election and how to win it. This president is not exempted from that school of thought. If Rivers State boils in violence and pandemonium, it may engulf the whole region. Who wants that?
Twelveth-century French Neo-Platonist philosopher Bernard Chartres said: “…we see more and farther than our predecessors, not because we have keener vision or greater height but because we are lifted up and borne aloft on their gigantic stature.”All men need other men to become great men. No godfather holds sway and stranglehold on a people forever. There will come a time when either the people he lords over wise up and push back hard, or the godfather who thinks he is ‘god of men’ is rendered a mere man by the God of heaven who created him. Godfathers’ reigning tenures have an expiration date that even godfathers may have no clue about. Are the godfathering days of Nyesom Wike coming to a humiliating and humbling close, or a heroic and high-flying draw-down? I don’t know. From the rooftop we watch.
Credit: Fola Ojo