The frenzied jockeying for political supremacy in Rivers State between Governor Siminalayi Fubara and FCT minister Nyesom Wike is bound to constitute one additional piece in the 2027 presidential election jigsaw puzzle for President Tinubu. Rivers has indeed become a simplified complexity. The state legislature is APC majority, but the lawmakers don’t see eye-to-eye with the governor who is now also in APC, having recently defected to the ruling party from the moribund PDP. The supposed political leader of the state remains Mr Wike who is still standing pat in the PDP but who receives the loyalty of the legislature almost in its entirety. Finally, in the puzzle, both the PDP and APC in the legislature are largely and firmly pro-Wike.
However, President Tinubu will need both Mr Fubara and Mr Wike joining hands together to ‘deliver’ Rivers to the APC; but these are two men engaged in shadow boxing, with one continuing to posture imperiously, and the other unable to decipher sublime politics, let alone practise it with the suavity and depth expected of a leader with the most basic qualification. What the president must find ways of dealing with is how to manage two Rivers politicians with very large egos. Mr Wike brooks no challenge, and Mr Fubara gives no quarter. One is ruthless and the other naïve; and both will, going forward, demand the president to clarify his allegiances. But it is a clarification the president will be loth to give.
He will prefer to walk the tightrope than recklessly do pole vaulting and risk breaking a leg or an arm.
