The FCT Minister, Nyesom Wike, is being courted by the All Progressives Congress (APC), which has stated that when he accepts to join the party, he will become the party’s leader in Rivers State.
According to reports, Wike, the state’s most recent governor, has been at odds with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) since the 2023 general elections, when he ran for the party’s presidential ticket but lost to former vice president Atiku Abubakar in the primary. Despite his insistence that he still belongs to the party, Wike has reportedly become distant from the party.
A recent cold war between him and Siminalayi Fubara, his political godson and the state’s current governor, caused the State House of Assembly to become polarized and ultimately resulted in the defection of 27 of his (Wike’s) faithful lawmakers to the APC.
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But the Rivers State chapter of the APC said that the developments have confirmed that the peace talks that President Bola Tinubu had sparked between Wike and Fubara had collapsed. On Wednesday, Edison Ehie, the court-recognized Speaker of the House and a staunch supporter of Fubara, declared the seats of the 27 lawmakers vacant.
Following his meeting with the National Working Committee (NWC) at the APC national secretariat in Abuja, Tony Okocha, the chairman of the state’s APC caretaker committee, revealed this information to reporters yesterday while updating them on the latest events in the state.
He declared, “We want the APC to win Rivers this time, and when he (Wike) comes, he will be the party’s leader in the state.”
In response to a query regarding the recently reported intervention by Tinubu, Okocha stated, “Whatever that was, it has broken down, and it has been broken irreconcilably.”
In addition, Okocha said that it was unconstitutional for the four state assembly members to have approved the budget that Governor Fubara had provided to them for the 2024 fiscal year in the absence of the 27 members who had recently defected to the APC.
Okocha added that due to several constitutional violations, the party’s legislators in the state House of Assembly were thinking about starting the impeachment process against Governor Fubara.
Even though I do not sit on the state House of Assembly, the process of impeachment is democratic. He declared, “Implementation is not a coup d’état.”
Speaking about the state House of Assembly complex’s demolition, Okocha declared that the APC would not tolerate the growth of lawlessness in the state. He further stated that the MPs who had defected would convene somewhere else as long as they carried the mace, a representation of power. Additionally, let me to inform you that an assembly is made up of its members, not its structure.
As a result, an assembly can be held anywhere as long as the mace, which serves as its emblem of authority, is present. About 27 members met as of yesterday and made significant decisions about state affairs, he said.
