Even a child in the primary school should not be told about who the Supervising Minister for Education, Nyesom Wike, is. The Nigerian populace knows him better as the arrow head of the crises that have been rocking Rivers State, than as the Minister for Education he was supposed to be. Supposedly, he is better known as a rabble-rouser than a diplomat.
His incessant showcasing of affront in the politics of Rivers offends every sensibility. His recent remarks that Governor Chibuike Amaechi of Rivers State would go to jail in the event that President Goodluck Jonathan wins in the 2015 presidential elections put Wike’s reputation in question.
Conversely, this statement shows that Wike has exhausted all the avenues he knew to remove Amaechi from office. Wike had leaned on the cases that Amaechi had with some opposition members concerning the 2007 and 2011 gubernatorial elections in the state to make his boast of removing Amaechi, but when he has seen that that did not work, he prolonged his boast to 2015; a tactic he has been using to hoodwink his unsuspecting marooned followership in some local government areas of the state.
It is left for those who still take Wike seriously to continue to follow him. But the in-thing is that if there is anybody who may be heading to the gulag before or after 2015 for impropriation of office, that person is invariably not Amaechi, but Wike. No matter what Wike thinks, the government of Amaechi has been in the full swing of administration since its inception. But just a fraction of the Nigerian institutions, such as the Ministry for Education that Wike was appointed to man, has been in total ramshackle and the minister was busy chasing after grasshopper round Amaechi’s building, hoping to hear when Amaechi would say stop.
Wike’s swagger that the Port Harcourt International Airport and all the land and sea boarders in Rivers State would be shut down immediately the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) announces the victory of President Jonathan in 2015 to prevent Governor Amaechi from escaping, is a vacant show-off. Nevertheless, the statement shows that the second term of Mr. President would have more to vendetta than work to alleviate the plight of the hundreds of millions of Nigerians the unenthusiastic brag such as Wike’s, has jeopardised their future.
The issue is that Wike, instead of accepting with courage that he is afraid of the political sagacity and dexterity of Amaechi, is making statements to the contrary. Wike continues to expose himself to public ridicule by saying that Rivers State is PDP, instead of accepting the fact that the party he belongs to has been slammed into being an opposition.
Against all odds, Wike least expected that he would be in the opposition political party in Rivers State, therefore he is making every unprintable comment against Amaechi, so that his ill-fated followership will continue to be misled. What Wike does not realise before sending Amaechi to his prison in 2015 is that the state apparatuses are not complaining; they are of the statement that Amaechi has been accounting for every bit of his stewardship, consequently he has no reason to be afraid of any probe.
It is understandable that Wike has no account to render on his own education stewardship other than how he has been fighting hard in making sure that Amaechi was removed and sent direct to prison without any forms of trial by a court of competent jurisdiction.
Education in Nigeria has really suffered under Wike’s watch the same way he wants Rivers State to suffer because he wants to be controlling the power in the state from Abuja. Results today are that Wike does not make coherent statements, except those of war, kill and bury.
Aside being the LGA chairman, Wike fervently became noticed when he was appointed as the Chief of Staff to the governor and subsequently minister; the latter being the position he has turned to his guerrilla base, from where he takes off to bomb Amaechi with unedited words and hopeless political strategies aimed at ousting Amaechi.
Odimegwu Onwumere,
Port Harcourt, Rivers state
