The Minister of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Nyesom Wike, has reacted to the political crisis in Rivers State, saying that the party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), is looking into the matter.
He said this while receiving South-South leaders at his office on Tuesday. He said that once he loses his base as a politician, he has lost his relevance politically. Wike explained that no amount of calumny levelled against him would make him lose sleep, adding that the right thing must be done.
“All of us want to be politically relevant; all of us want to maintain our political structure,” the minister said.
“Is it not your political structure? Will you allow anybody to just cut you out immediately? Everybody has a base. If you take my base, am I not politically irrelevant?”
Wike said the internal wranglings will be settled using the party’s mechanisms.
“In politics, there are a lot of internal wranglings,” he said.
“But to come out and say ‘Oh they want to do this against me, it will not work.’ I had every power then to say where this thing is going. So, when things are wrong, you ask questions. It is a party affair. The party knows how they resolve their own mechanism, it is not an ethnic affair.
“Our party is coming to it, that is what I will say. Every politician has his own interest,” the former governor added.
Wike’s comments come amid reports of a rift between him and his successor, Simi Fubara. The two men reportedly fell out less than six months after Fubara’s inauguration as Governor of Rivers State.
The crisis came to a head on Monday when Fubara stormed the Rivers State House of Assembly complex with his loyalists to prevent lawmakers from carrying out impeachment proceedings against him.
Recall that Governor Bala Mohammed of Bauchi State, who is the chairman of the PDP Governors’ Forum, said earlier today that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has intervened to resolve the issue.