30th January, 2014
By Ademola Adegbamigbe
In recent times, apart from the North-East which has remained under the jackboot of the Boko Haram insurgents, Rivers State is another epicentre of avoidable violence. Avoidable, in the sense that those who are expected to act right have thrown decency into the gutter.
On 19 January, militants disorganised a Save Rivers Movement, SRM, rally in Bori, Ogoni traditional and Khana Local Government headquarters of the state. As the militants shot into the air to drive fear into whoever wanted to still continue with the show, two persons were feared shot dead. In the pandemonium, George Fayii, the secretary to the Rivers State Government who is an Ogoni and another from the same enclave, Chief Tony Okocha, Chief of Staff, Government House and others who were Governor Rotimi Amaechi’s group members, were caught up, at the All Saints Anglican Church, venue of the event. Many commissioners and other top aides voted with their feet in order to live and fight their political battle another day.
A week earlier, the police disrupted an SRM rally which was to take place at the Rivers State College of Arts and Science, Rumuola, Port Harcourt. And in the stampede, Senator Magnus Abe, representing the Rivers South-east Senatorial District, was shot, allegedly by rubber bullet, in the chest and had to be flown to a hospital in London for treatment.
While the Bori rally by SRM was scattered by certain desperadoes, the police offered shield for the Grassroots Development Initiative, GDI, which held its own at Degema, headquarters of Degema Local Government Area. This group belongs to Amaechi’s arch enemy, Nyesom Wike, the supervising Minister of Education.
When the police knew that tongues would start to wag over these two rallies that took place within 24 hours of each other, with Amaechi’s made to “walk through the valley of the shadow of death” and Wike’s protected “under the shadow of the almighty Police”, its spokesman, Ahmad Muhammed, offered an explanation which, as soon as he fired it, was intercepted mid-air.
Igo Aguma, SRM coordinator, waved Muhammed off as a congenital liar in need of exorcism. He and Ken Atsuwete, the group’s attorney, insisted that their group “notified the police of the Bori rally and applied for protection”. It was for this reason that they slated the rally for 2pm. The group, therefore, set up canopies, arraigned chairs, erected podium, lectern and others. In fact, the rally was to be televised live by Channels Television which had its Mercedes Benz Outside Broadcasting, OB, van at the ready. Its camera crew men were also on standby.
That day, however, SRM members said, the police disposed and dispersed them! It was not only the politicians who were attacked and driven capriciously in different directions, Channel’s OB van, and its Toyota Hiace bus, were vandalised. The pit of hell, that day, let loose its legion of demons on Bori!
One thing that is very clear in this drama is that the police, under Mbu Joseph Mbu, the commissioner, have acted as an interested party in a dispute. That they looked on while hoodlums unleashed hell on SRM but protected Wike’s group, GDI, the previous day as it hauled obscenities at the opposing camp, is one sin that the police will find difficult to receive forgiveness for.
Mbu should realise that his posting to that state is to maintain law and order and to save lives. But the way the police top brass acts as if he is the security attaché of the PDP to Rivers leaves much to be desired. He should remember that history records the activities of every public figure, either for good or bad. Pray, how does he want to be remembered in the next 50 years? What will Mbu write in his memoirs when he retires – Gestapo Chief, Heinrich Mueller? Or will he write that he was a protector of the weak and the dispossessed during his tour of duty in Rivers and elsewhere? How will his children’s classmates regard him, in school- a disinterested party or “Partisan Mbu”?
Another individual who needs to act as a real elder and father for all Nigerians in this matter is President Goodluck Jonathan. I am sure that he is not too busy with how to tackle the jinxed power sector, Boko Haram, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s letters and how to capture votes in 2015 as not to know that Rivers State is a major political flashpoint that can do his administration much damage even as the 2015 election draws closer. Or will the President tell Nigerians he does not know that Mbu is over-acting his script as a lick-spittle of Patience Jonathan and PDP?
Now, on the President’s wife, Patience. She is from Okrika in Rivers State and the world is watching whether she will look on as her own state burns and victims of political violence are taken in stretchers to the hospitals or morgues.
Notwithstanding that the constitution does not recognise her role, history has ways of putting her like in certain moral categories – those who acted as good influence on their husbands or those who, with the tilt of their heads, would ask the guards to “feed offenders to the lions”.
There was Jezebel in the Bible who persuaded her husband, Ahab, to appropriate the ancestral vineyard of Naboth, the Jezreelite. The duo killed the owner. Marie Antoinette, wife of Louis XV1 of France, reacted when people complained that they lacked bread: “Give them cake!” Her actions and others’ sparked off the French Revolution.
The world will not forget the action of Leila Trabels, second wife of Ben Ali of Tunisia, who did not want to know the difference between the public kitty and her husband’s resources. Elena Ceausescu helped her husband, Nicolai Ceausescu, to ride rough shod over communist Romania. Both died by firing squad when the government fell. What of Imelda Marcos of the Philippines and Lucy Muthoni Kibaki of Kenya who slapped civil servants at will? Their images are bad copies in the consciousness of people.
However, not all First Ladies are bad. The world is proud of Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of US President Franklin Roosevelt; Graca Machel (widow of Nelson Mandela), Lucia Topolansky, wife of the world’s poorest president, Jose Mujica of Uruguay.
Which side does Patience Jonathan want to be grouped? It is not too late for her and her husband to do what is right in Rivers and elsewhere.