Nyesom Wike, the volcano in littoral Port Harcourt, has been rumbling loudly recently. Not that he has ever been dormant anyway. You must give it to Wike, he is ever ready to be ignited, blessed with abundant energy, to do and to talk, in equal measures. He has an uncommon capacity as well to get into the mix regularly. Wike comes across as the type to whom adversaries are never in short supply or, indeed, far away. If they do not locate him, he goes all out to court them. Altercations are his life, seemingly.
The tenure of Wike as governor of Rivers State has been eventful, without a doubt. Nobody, not even his harshest critics, will convincingly deny the fact that the governor has worked hard and has impacted substantially on the state, especially in the realm of infrastructural development. The many bridges and roads he has constructed all over Rivers State speak for him. For a man who does not miss and cannot allow a bragging opportunity to pass, Wike’s concrete works in Rivers offer him an ample platform on which he mounts to brag. Concede it to him, he has worked hard to gain his bragging rights.
His people may be weary of him at times, but they concede as well that Wike’s tenure has made a difference in Port Harcourt and various parts of the often restive state. Rivers State will certainly not forget Governor Nyesom Wike easily when he is gone from office, if not for his roads and bridges, for his regular harangues, duly relayed on television channels, for effect.
Although he was active as a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) when the party was the ruling national party, Wike’s arrival at the seat of governor in Rivers State coincided with the PDP losing power at the centre. For PDP, expectedly, the transition from a ruling party for 16 years to a much more circumscribed opposition corner was traumatic. All manner of challenges confronted the party, among them an intricate leadership contestation that was traced not far from the doorsteps of the new ruling party. Such is the lot of a party out of the central power loop.
Wike played his own part, characteristically robust, in the struggle to retrieve the control of the PDP from agents commissioned to damage its bearing. Sanity was later restored in the party’s national leadership.
For the role he played in rescuing his party in its period of crisis, Wike has been making claims on the PDP that bears resemblance to the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on Third World countries that borrowed money. The interest never ever gets sorted out, not to talk of the principal. Going by the Rivers State governor’s credit book, what the PDP owes him is for life. First, he nominated the post-crisis national chairman of the party. How he parted ways with the same man he made chairman of the party is another matter altogether. Then he cornered the hosting of the national convention of the party leading to the 2019 general election. When some interests in the party hierarchy became uncomfortable with the governor’s overbearing attempt as host governor to dictate who got what at the convention and, therefore, mooted the idea of moving the convention from Port Harcourt, Wike exploded. He publicly threatened to dismantle the party, if the convention venue was tampered with. He reminded all that he had made enormous sacrifice to reclaim the party. For Wike, it was an entitlement. The party capitulated. In the final analysis though, he did not have his way in the eventual outcome of the convention. Now, he is back. It is time for PDP to pay another tranche of the debt the party owes him.
It is not known here when exactly Wike decided to seek his party’s nomination for the presidential ticket for the 2023 election or why he is running. Of course, he is qualified to run. As for what inspires him on this enterprise, there are interesting possibilities. Is he running in protest over a wrong done to him or his constituency? Is he out to be a potent counterforce to someone else, either within his party or without? It is also possible that he truly believes that he can be a good President. Or is he running because he reckons that the PDP cannot refuse him a platform to do whatever he wants to do, after all, the party owes him for life? Only Wike knows what his primary motive is.
Whatever his motivation may be, the fact is that Wike is out there seeking his party’s nomination for the presidential ticket. And since the very day he entered the race, neither the party nor the other contenders within the party have had peace. That is what the Wike package contains.
Does Wike offer some values and sharp edges that the PDP can benefit from? Yes, of course. As he himself proclaims on top of the roof, he is bold and courageous. It seems so. But a profound interrogation of what Wike sees as courage and boldness may be necessary, to put issues in perspective and possibly help his party and the larger society at a critical point. Nigeria has degenerated to a level where decency and reason often appear to be unbeneficial attributes to those who have then. But for that, pugnaciousness and a nagging problem with self-restraint will rarely count as virtues.
While it is true that the gift of subtlety is not given to all, there is always beauty in finesse, even on the turf of politics. But then, it can be asked, is finesse a useful attribute to have in the jungle? The answer may well weigh in favour of the Wike persona. That is the realm where politics and government presently operate in Nigeria.
There is no doubt that the governor of Rivers State means well for his party and indeed for Nigeria. He has shown himself to be a man who places premium on justice and equity, one who is ready to stand up to injustice in Nigeria’s troubled polity. Curiously, however, Wike, who is from the South-South geopolitical zone and who continues to insist that it is wrong for the North to seek to produce Nigeria’s President at the end of Muhammadu Buhari’s eight-year tenure, does not see anything wrong in a South-southerner competing for the PDP ticket with candidates from the South-East.
When former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, who Wike has particularly committed himself to tackle, offered to withdraw from seeking the presidential ticket in PDP, if the position will be specifically zoned to the South-East for the sake of equity, Wike demurred and continued his campaign. Obviously, then, he comes to equity with a compromised hand.
As the aspirants for the PDP presidential ticket justle for advantage and pitch to various prospective delegates, the slant of Wike’s pitches have unsettling edges to them. When he was not declaring that only death can make him to step down from the race, he was prophesying that PDP will be dead if it loses the 2023 elections. He leaves no one in doubt that it is only with him that PDP can win the presidential election. The question is, how?
When Wike declared, characteristically too, that he was the only person in PDP who could wrest power from APC, you just could not miss his point. He was, referring, obviously, to the brawn aspect of it. That, he seems to contend, is where Nigerian politics is, at the WWF level.