Ever since the fight for power and control commenced in Rivers State between Governor Siminalayi Fubara and his immediate predecessor and current Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Minister, Nyesom Wike, it was obvious the two groups were going for broke. While Gov. Fubara may have lulled himself to proclaim, as he did last May, that the ‘jungle has matured’ enough for him to take the fight to his godfather, he did not reckon with the deployment of federal might. On Tuesday, he learned his lesson the hard way when President Bola Tinubu declared a state of emergency that suspended him from office with the appointment of an administrator for the state. Unfortunately, the nation’s democratic journey has been down this dangerous road before, and it is always a slippery territory.
Although the crisis in Rivers State started immediately Nyesome Wike left office, it took five months to blow open in October 2023, when some lawmakers loyal to him initiated impeachment proceedings against Gov. Fubara. “All of us want to be politically relevant; all of us want to maintain our political structure,” Nysome Wike had said in response to allegations that he was behind the surreptitious attempt to oust the governor. “Will you allow anybody to just cut you out immediately? Everybody has a base. If you take my base, am I not politically irrelevant?”
Like the position taken by President Donald Trump on the war between Russia and Ukraine, President Tinubu took sides with Nyesome Wike while urging the incumbent to compromise for peace to reign in his state. What followed was the bombing of a section of the House of Assembly complex by forces loyal to the governor who then relocated the legislative arm to the Government House, Port Harcourt. And with 27 members ostracised, Gov. Fubara began to govern with four lawmakers domiciled within his office, thus making nonsense of the doctrine of separation of powers on which the presidential system is anchored, and without which there can be no transparency and accountability in governance.
Meanwhile, it is interesting that President Tinubu is repeating the exact same illegality for which he attacked his predecessors. When in 2013, Goodluck Jonathan declared a state of emergency in three states, the then opposition leader, Bola Ahmed Tinubu decried the move, saying that the country was “witnessing a dangerous trend in the art of governance…a deliberate ploy to subvert constitutional democracy.” In a statement he personally signed, he had called on “those who love this country genuinely (to) advise the federal government not to tinker with the mandates of these governors under any guise. It is a potentially destructive path to take,” adding: “Any measures put in place which alienate the people, in particular their elected representatives, should be considered as fundamentally defective by every right-thinking person in the country.”
President Jonathan did not do as much as suspend the governors, yet Bola Ahmed Tinubu wrote a damning statement ‘in defense of democracy’. But the hypocrisy is understandable. Handlers of every sitting president have always seen the declaration of a state of emergency as a political tool that could be deployed against rampaging opponents. On 3rd June 2014, for instance, the late Ijaw Leader, Chief Edwin Clark, accused the then Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Bello Adoke of ‘misadvising’ President Goodluck Jonathan, in a 16-page letter he (Clark) still decided to read to the media. After citing the examples of President Olusegun Obasanjo who used ‘emergency powers’ to suspend Gov. Dariye (Plateau State) on 18th May 2004 and Gov. Ayo Fayose (Ekiti State) on 19th October 2006, Chief Clark had wondered why Jonathan was being prevented by Justice Adoke to apply the same principle to remove Governors Kashim Shettima (Borno), Murtala Nyako (Adamawa) and Ibrahim Geidam (Yobe). “The President needs to suspend the affected states’ political structures because the roles of these governors have revealed them as conspirators who are hiding under the guise of opposition to display their politics of bitterness, hatred, ethnicity, and religion to disparage him and scuttle Jonathan’s constitutional right to seek a second term as guaranteed by the 1999 Constitution,” Clark wrote.
From the editorial standpoint, it was believed at the time and still today, that Justice Adoke sided with the law and Jonathan acted correctly on the issue. In line with this view, it is safe to say that the action taken by President Tinubu on the crisis in Rivers State is self-serving, and to use his own words, “setting in motion a chain of events the end of which nobody can predict.”
While President Obasanjo got away with two ‘emergencies’ that ousted governors from office, President Jonathan chose not to travel that route in a commendable act of statesmanship. But the same Bola Ahmed Tinubu who had waxed lyrical about the illegality of such action in the past has suspended the governor and legislature of a state against the background of what is no more than a contrived crisis. The real danger, as could be seen in the United States where the powers of the president are being stretched, is that this may be the beginning of testing the limits of many of the assumptions that undergird our democracy in pursuit of self-interest.
Can this declaration not become an avenue for mischief makers in some states to put their governors under siege and then expect the president to wield the big stick? Under a system that is becoming increasingly intolerant of opposing views, are we not susceptible to constitutional dictatorship? Will a successful execution of this emergency order not embolden the president to go the ‘extra mile’ in other extra-constitutional matters, even concerning his term of office? Is the system not unwittingly encouraging the creation of Alberto Fujimori (who as an elected president dissolved the Peruvian Congress and Supreme Court, effectively becoming a dictator)? Have all the available options been explored before this emergency rule? Is it only a ‘military administrator’ that can restore order in a supposedly democratic government?
Like the mother of the dead child in the Biblical story of King Solomon’s judgment, the Rivers State House of Assembly Speaker, Martin Amaewhule, who led Nyesome Wike’s ground forces against Gov. Fubara, has endorsed the presidential proclamation. But the main concern is about the future of Nigeria’s democracy. Considering how the president ‘resolved’ the Lagos State House of Assembly crisis with the return of an impeached Speaker, Nigerians should all be wary of breeding an imperial presidency. With the All Progressives Congress (APC) National Secretary, Ajibola Basiru calling on the president to apply the same formula in Osun State against the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) Governor Ademola Adeleke, there may be no end to this ‘Kabiyesi Syndrome’, especially with a National Assembly whose leadership would only ask the president ‘how many times?’ the moment he asks them to jump!
Clearly, there is a travesty of democratic norms in the hasty declaration of a state of emergency in Rivers State. But the effect of this haste can only be remedied through the invocation of the power of dialogue as a democratic tool. Such dialogue must be across the partisan aisle. In addition, it remains within the powers of the president to whittle down the influence of those whose political interests may be behind the aggravation of the crisis in Rivers State. Besides, the brand of gunboat politics that necessitated the emergency rule in the first place must be discouraged. The people of Rivers State deserve better than a show of imperial presidential display and supremacist partisanship.
