Wike contributed nothing to Tinubu’s Rivers victory-APC Campaign Council
Publicity Secretary of All Progressives Congress (APC) Campaign Council in Rivers State in the last general elections, Barrister Sogbeye Eli, was elected Chairman of Degema Local Government Area (LGA) under APC in 2015. A former State Youth Leader of the party, he later emerged National Chairman of Conference of APC State Youth Leaders and has also served the party in various capacities at Ward, LGA, State and National levels.
In this interview, he demonstrated the immense anger and deep disappointment of the party’s members in Rivers State with President Bola Tinubu who, rather than pick candidates for Ministerial and other offices from within their fold, stretched out his arms to the ‘enemy’ of Rivers APC, Nyesom Wike, for appointment. The fearless legal practitioner bared his minds on APC members’ current emotions and other issues.
2023: Wike contributed nothing to Tinubu’s Rivers victory –APC Campaign Council
The Daily Times: Leading APC chieftains in Rivers State obviously may feel betrayed by President Bola Tinubu’s appointment of PDP former Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike into his cabinet. Not just that, key appointments into Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) were also denied them. Have you tried to reach the Presidency on this? Do you feel used and perhaps, dumped?
Eli: I am unaware of any official communication of complaints by the Rivers State Chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to the President and Commander-in-Chief, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, on the character of appointments he has made from Rivers State since assumption of office on May 29, 2023 to date.
Suffice to say however, that the groundswell of opinion within the party’s mainstream is one of betrayal by the President of the myriad sacrifices in human and material losses that were made by the Rivers State chapter since 2014.
The members of our great party are in severe shock by the turn of events. In fact, many are wandering if the appointing authority that brought Nyesom Wike in as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory is the same Asiwaju who is sufficiently informed about our story of unprovoked tragedies from Day One.
As National Leader of the APC, President Tinubu is knowledgeable enough of the travails of the Rivers State chapter to the minutest details. The questions to ask in the circumstance are: when did Tinubu become what we now see where progressive politics is all about expediency?
Given the unassailable fact known to every card-carrying member of the APC across the Federation that some of the leaders of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in Rivers State cannot be absolved of complicity in the assassination and killings of APC members since membership registration in 2014, at the 2015 general elections and thereafter, are these appointments of PDP members by President Tinubu APC’s reward to the PDP for taking the lives of our members?
Would the world that knows Chief Christopher Adube, for instance, whose family, save his wife and son, was wiped out with him in Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni Local Government Area see any justification howsoever in these appointments?
How does his son who has been condemned to a wheelchair since 2015, his spine having been ruined in that brutal attack on his father, see the APC as a party worth reckoning with? And yet the Adube family is only a metaphor for the carnage visited on the APC in Rivers State by Wike’s PDP.
As Governor, Wike was busy with phantom probe panels to indict and criminalize Rotimi Amaechi to stop him from appointment as Minister of the Government of the Federation under President Muhammadu Buhari.
He went after other leaders of the APC in the State but never set up one Commission of Inquiry to probe the killing of Nigerians in their own State even though he appointed two Attorneys-General to serve his eight-year Administration.
So those who see appointing Wike and other PDP members in Rivers State to positions by President Tinubu to the total exclusion of members of our party are right to see such appointments as betrayal of our people.
According to Uthman dan Fodio, “Conscience is an open wound; only Truth can heal it”.
The Daily Times: Tinubu won Rivers during the February 25 presidential poll, thanks to Wike. That’s the narrative we hear everyday. Certainly, APC Rivers made an input, didn’t it?
Eli: You know the proverb of giving a dog a bad name in order to hang it? This is what is afoot in this case. Someone, somewhere who is not comfortable with the composition or constitution of the APC in a Southern State as Rivers for some inexplicable reasons, is behind the plot to have our efforts and sacrifices mortified.
The leadership of the APC, including President Tinubu and former President Buhari, watched the APC implode in Rivers State en route the 2019 elections. Internal wrangling and disagreements are not peculiar to our State chapter and therefore cannot be alibi for watching the roof collapse on our heads with the exclusion of our candidates from the 2019 ballot by the Judiciary.
I believe that the foundation of what we are seeing now with the Tinubu presidency was laid in the botched 2018 Ward Congresses and the removal of all our candidates in 2019.
But God is always ahead of every contrivance of men. Those who saw their strength in a weak Rivers State chapter of the APC, regardless of the fact that no other State chapter across the Federation paid the price or bore the losses we have suffered in the history of the party, are proving with the appointment of Wike and statements ascribing Tinubu’s victory in our State at the February 25th general elections of this year to his work, as the architects of our fate in 2019.
I say so because next to being aloof to or taking obvious sides in the internal crises that engulfed our State chapter from the April 2018 Ward Congresses, those who attribute Tinubu’s victory to Wike are conveyor belts of treachery. They fear no God and have no truth in them.
I challenge those who say so to present evidence of Wike campaigning for candidate Bola Ahmed Tinubu anywhere in the 23 Local Government Areas where Wike personally led the PDP campaigns for the 2023 elections.
Let them present one shred of evidence in proof of Wike calling on his supporters to vote for the incumbent President and I will not only publish a retraction of my statement here, I will apologize to Wike and those who are selling that dubious line to justify the injustice they have done to the President’s party in Rivers State.
Furthermore, I challenge those who claim Tinubu’s victory in our State as Wike’s handiwork to present the results Wike’s PDP allocated to President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 and the PDP presidential candidate in 2019, Atiku Abubakar, in juxtaposition with the final tally of a little over 400,000 votes INEC declared for Tinubu in 2023.
Remember that the 2023 figures represent the votes the President polled from Rivers APC, Magnus Abe’s SDP, the non-partisan quota of Rivers electorate and Wike’s PDP.
What formula in the science of precision that mathematics is can account for the palpable decline in the figures declared for winners of the presidential election in Rivers State in the three election cycles I have identified?
How can a candidate backed by Wike sitting as Governor score far less than candidates who had no such unity of votes in the demographics I have identified? The Devil is in the details of the sickening narrative that ascribes President Tinubu’s victory in Rivers State to Wike as we can see.
The Daily Times: Given your contributions as well as APC constitutional provision on reward/compensation for hard working party members, in your view, how should President Tinubu reward Rivers APC?
Eli: The President is experienced enough in politics to understand that he has embarked on a journey in Rivers State that offends God, public morality and good conscience as it stands. And I am not going to school his handlers on what the APC Constitution says in Article 9 on the compelling duty or obligation to appoint members of the party over and above other political considerations.
If any member of the APC should know that appointing non-APC members into a cabinet formed by the APC is an anti-party indulgence, the President who has been our National Leader and one-time Chairman of the APC Board of Trustees, should be the first on the list.
However, if President Tinubu or his close aides have forgotten, the President is in a position to exercise caution and, in fact, restraint as he is the hand behind the emergence of Dr. Muiz Banire (SAN) and Babatunde Ogala (SAN) as National Legal Advisers of the All Progressives Congress. No other leader of our great party enjoys that privilege. So there can be no excuse of ignorance of the provisions of the party’s Constitution from that quarters.
Against that backdrop therefore, let the President come to the realization as stated by a former American President that everything rises and falls with his leadership in the circumstance and effecting corrections to the manifest errors of judgment over Rivers State.
The Daily Times: Rivers State has been governed by PDP since 1999. How can APC change this complexion and take power?
Eli: This question reads like that poor narrative that Rivers State is a PDP State. We are a PDP State howbeit several souls have to be killed for the PDP to “win” in 2015 and thereafter. The truth is, we had the PDP as the dominant political party because Governors from Dr. Peter Odili in 1999 to now emerged from the PDP platform.
But in 2003, every scholar of Rivers politics can testify that Odili’s re-election was not a mere storm in a teacup with the rally of strong opposition forces under the embryonic umbrella of the Rivers Democratic Movement (RDM) led by Alabo Tonye Graham-Douglas (now late), Chief Sergeant Chidi Awuse (now the Chairman of the Rivers State Council of Traditional Rulers), Chief Bekinbo Soberekon (now late), Chief A. K. Horsfall, a former Director-General of the National Security Organization (now the Department of State Security), oil magnate Chief Pedro Egbe, former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Chibudom Nwuche, etc, etc.
The election of 2007 which saw the consequences of the unlawful exclusion of Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi by the PDP had its own myriad of challenges. In 2011, Dr. Abiye Sekibo, a former Minister of Transport under President Olusegun Obasanjo who also served the Administration of Dr. Odili as Secretary to the State Government, posed an impregnable challenge as candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). There was also Sir Celestine Omehia of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), etc.
So we have had more than feeble challenges to the presumed dominance of the PDP in Rivers State. I can say without any fear of equivocation that the PDP has ran an unstoppable lead since 1999 due to the carry-go elections format our country was used to under the PDP. The South-West fell to the PDP in 2003 for the same reason.
Above all, the reality of the results that we saw in 2023 from a new Electoral Act 2022 is further proof that the narrative of PDP being a component of the Rivers DNA is fluke.
If the APC had not been rigged by the fallen PDP Federal Government in 2015, Dr. Dakuku Peterside and not Nyesom Wike would have been Governor.
The unassailable facts of the results of the Court-ordered reruns in 2016 are further proof of my assertion. For a party that was rigged 100% by Wike’s PDP, we rallied back to securing two seats in the Senate with Senator Magnus Abe and Senator Andrew Uchendu at the reruns to PDP’s lone seat in the nation’s upper legislative chamber. We made similar impressive inroads in the House of Representatives and the Rivers State House of Assembly.
It goes without saying that the figures could have been more devastating for the PDP had the Supreme Court presented Rivers people with a second opportunity to choose between Peterside and Wike. Unless you don’t realize that the governorship is the biggest prize and chief motivation in our politics at the sub-national level.
The frenzy with which Wike’s PDP worked in cahoots with some elements to cause the implosion in 2018 that led to our eviction from the 2019 ballot is another example of the lie that Rivers is PDP. I can go on and on but let us leave it at that.
The Daily Times: Leaders of APC in Rivers State such as Dr Dakuku Peterside, Arc. Tonye Cole, and Tien JackRich are not engaging the President on the way forward for Rivers APC.
The Daily Times: I am unaware of what those gentlemen are doing in that direction at the moment and so cannot comment much on same. Suffice to say that it is an unrighteous thing to see those PDP elements appointed to offices by President Tinubu while those committed, hard working and proven APC eggheads are left in the shadows. There must be something beyond what the ordinary eye can see that Wike did, or is doing, for our President to warrant the anomalous situation we have on our hands.
The Daily Times: Do you see Gov. Siminalayi Fubara and the State Assembly defecting to APC?
Eli: I shouldn’t see such ordinarily. Especially being a non-PDP member, I cannot speak to what is going on in their party. However, given the character of politicians that are on field in Rivers State today, ruling that possibility out may be an unforgivable error of judgment.
READ ALSO: Opposition have paid NLC leadership $5m to destabilize.
When you have those who say one thing today and do another tomorrow; those who vow never to leave the PDP and would support whosoever emerged from the PDP presidential nomination convention but turned around to sabotage the candidate with a G-5 breakaway faction, anything is possible.
Remember that a Wike who described the APC as Stage 4 Cancer while his PDP is a less dangerous malaria but now has no qualms wining and dining with the same party he described with such despicable derision is the one leading the PDP. If he decrees this minute that the entire PDP structure as currently exists in Rivers State moves, so shall it be.
