Wike and the gang

One of the news highlights in the media last week was the visit of the governors of five Nigerian states to Madrid, the Spanish capital. Nyesom Wike, Okezie Ikpeazu, Seyi Makinde, Samuel Ortom, and Umaru Fintiri, the governors of Rivers, Abia, Oyo, Benue, and Adamawa states respectively, were on that trip. By some coincidence, all five governors are members of the Peoples’ Democratic Party, (PDP).

How that visit dominated the news the same week when over a dozen presidents and heads of states of West African countries converged in their personal capacities in Abuja, for a conference of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), is probably a measure of certain media disinterestedness in national goings-on. It was the same week when bandits and terrorists raised their quantum bestiality one notch higher, setting ablaze nearly four dozen innocent souls, in a particular incident in Sokoto state.

Once again, President Muhammadu Buhari lived up to his trademark unfeelingness to his constituents. His suspect compassion was once more manifested via his typically cliched condolence correspondence. This time around, he was gracious enough to despatch the national security adviser (NSA), Baba Gana Munguno, and the inspector general of police (IGP), Usman Alkali Baba, to the troubled area. Buhari was in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), penultimate week, and waltzed through Scotland, France, and South Africa, a few weeks before, for the records. Just before then, he was in New York, Riyadh, Mecca, and Addis Ababa, respectively. But Sokoto, like Borno or Anambra or Benue, are usually so, so distant and farfetched.

Perhaps if Wike alone had featured on that visit to Madrid, it would have lent itself to lesser controversy. Under Wike’s leadership, the Rivers state government has perfected a partnership with the famous Real Madrid Football Foundation (RMFF), for the establishment of a football academy in the capital, Port Harcourt. Rivers state, by the way, has produced some of Nigeria’s, even Africa’s most successful footballers. Jossy Dombraye, Adokiye Amasiemaka, Finidi George, Eddy Lord Dombraye, Taribo West, George Abbey, Emmanuel Ebiede, Joseph Yobo, and Furo Iyenemi, distinguished themselves across football clubs, soccer pitches, and stadia, in various places in the world. Younger players like Izu Azuka, Andrea Cossu, Hector Tubonemi Nwokoye Chukwudi, and Pere Ariweriyai, also from Rivers state, are still plying their trades in several countries.

Part of Wike’s vision is for the project to leverage the abundant sporting talent in the state to raise stars for the future. It is a veritable youth empowerment programme, capable of taking children off the streets and providing them an opportunity to build a sustainable professional career. The downstream engagements and opportunities created by such an idea include successful players having their personal trainers, managers, media officers, and so on. The concept is consistent with the novel governance mantra of thinking outside the box, especially in dreary socioeconomic circumstances currently bedeviling our country.

The idea, mooted by Wike in 2017, has been concretised since October 2019, when Wike and the executive vice-president of the Real Madrid Football Club Foundation, (RMFCF), Enrique Sanchez Gonzalez, both endorsed the ratification agreement on the partnership for the Real Madrid Academy, Port Harcourt. Wike had stated inter alia at the event, that: “We are preparing the Real Madrid Academy as a veritable pathway for our young stars to be international football talents and for them to achieve their dreams. We will offer them exposure, nurturing opportunities and mentorship by world-renowned professionals at the Real Madrid Academy”.

Wike equally spoke about the economic benefits of the academy, to the expansion of the resource base of Rivers state, the second largest in the country. Sanchez commended the Rivers state government for its commitment to using football as a tool for youth empowerment. Ikpeazu accompanied Wike on that visit, while Makinde was present at the inauguration of the fully built academy, not too long after. Sunday Dare, the sports minister, commissioned the project in March this year, much as it was fully ready in 2020, but for the ravaging COVID-19 menace. Pioneer entrants into the academy are being processed as we speak, beginning with the reduction of the initial list of applicants from 2,300 to 1,500, in the first instance.

The Madrid visit threw up all manner of conjectures. In one instance, it was suggested that the governors on the trip planned to poll resources together to buy up Real Madrid football club! The governors must be harvesting resources from avenues unknown to the rest of us. Didn’t a governor purportedly domicile the sum of N20 billion in a fixed account in a bank the other day, supposedly borrowed to offset workers’ salaries? The same governor is alleged by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), to have withdrawn N60 billion cash over the past six years, for personal use. He will have his day in the popular court, someday. With innovation-minded governors like Wike or Makinde or Fintiri or Ortom and others wanting to leave lasting imprimaturs in refocusing the development of their people and their states, however, such assumptions are farfetched.

Another school of thought has proposed that the five governors travelled to Madrid, to discuss a consensus template for the emergence of the presidential flagbearer of the PDP, ahead of the potentially politically racy year 2022. According to reports in a major Nigerian newspaper, the first foreign trip of PDP governors on the presidential project was held in London, shortly after the party’s national convention on Saturday, October 30, and Sunday, October 31. Udom Emmanuel of Akwa Ibom state was reportedly on the London trip. Fintiri took his place on the more recent Madrid outing, which took place during the outgone week of December 8-11, 2021. Aminu Waziri Tambuwal and Bala Mohammed of Sokoto and Bauchi were said to be absent on those trips, because they are on the road, holding consultations with critical stakeholders ahead of their formal declarations for the nation’s top job.

Arising from the various versions of the motivation for that trip by five PDP governors, each representing one each of the nation’s six geopolitical zones except the north-west, I reached out to very senior government officials in three of the five states, whose helmsmen were on the Madrid movement. From Paulinus Nsirim, Rivers state commissioner for information and communication, to Tivlumun Nyitse, communication scholar and chief of staff to the Benue State governor, and then to Maxwell Gidado, law professor and senior advocate of Nigeria (SAN), who is also the chief of staff to Fintiri, the narrative was the same.

The visit we understand was at the instance of the Madrid-based RMFCF, which invited the sports-loving governors on a tour of facilities. Inspired by the success story of the Rivers state government’s collaboration with the Real Madrid Football Foundation, Wike’s colleagues in other geopolitical zones, desire similar prototypes for the growth of football and other sports. Governments, I am told, crave more businesslike involvement and investment in sports, to ensure sustainable survival of sporting activities. There has, for example, been a change in the management of Adamawa United Football Club (AUFC), with the state government shopping for a new supervisory arrangement, which would not be wholly dependent on government. Having successfully emplaced the Real Madrid project in his state, Wike, therefore, was the essential pathfinder for his colleagues.

Wike’s selfless contributions to democracy, politics, and governance under the present dispensation cannot be underestimated. At the height of the 2016/2017 leadership impasse which threw up Ali Modu Sherrif and Ahmed Makarfi as factional chairmen of the PDP, Wike almost singularly assumed responsibility for offsetting the bills of the party, including its multi-pronged court legal battles. The supreme court on July 12, 2017, subsequently sacked Sherrif and reinstated Makarfi, rightfully. At the height of the deadly herders belligerence against farmers in Benue state in 2018, Wike visited his colleague, Ortom, and donated N200 million for the upkeep of displaced Benue people in refugee camps. The PDP presidential primaries of October 2018, which produced Atiku Abubakar, Nigeria’s former vice president as flagbearer, was hosted by Rivers state under Wike’s watch.

Wike was at the battlefront for the reelection of Godwin Obaseki of Edo state, last year. Remarkably, he called the bluff of the inspector general of police (IGP), at the time, Mohammed Adamu, who called Wike on the telephone and asked him to vacate Edo state before the actual polls. Wike stayed put in Benin city the state capital, until the results were tallied and Obaseki overwhelmingly elected, against all odds. January this year, the characteristically benevolent Wike, supported the people of Sokoto state for the reconstruction of the Sokoto central market which was razed down by fire early in that month.

For Wike, the charity of necessity begins at home. Rivers state under his leadership has hosted perhaps the largest number of dignitaries, across political and geographical divides, invited to inaugurate projects. To be sure, for a stretch of three weeks culminating in the sixth anniversary of his government on May 29, 2021, all roads led to Rivers state from across the country to see and acknowledge the lasting legacies of the Wike milieu. The massive construction of roads, bridges, flyovers, housing projects, educational infrastructures, healthcare facilities, agricultural schemes, and so on, earned Wike the sobriquet “Mr Projects” by no less a person than Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, just about two years of Wike’s stint in office.

Photographs of the governors with Real Madrid officials at the Santiago Bernabeu Stadium in Madrid are all over the internet. It’s actually very refreshing to see our leaders smartly attired like regular guys, being themselves as it were, in face caps, jackets, sweaters, jeans, chinos, and sneakers, all by themselves. They cut the image of big boys all set for a weekend hangout, without that retinue of sycophantic aides and advisers, fawning, actually falling over themselves, faking loyalty and altruism. Those voluptuous ‘agbadas‘ and overstarched, often over-embroidered ‘babanrigas‘ actually took a momentary break.

In December 2020, Aisha Buhari, wife of the president, relocated to Dubai, citing “insecurity in Aso Villa”. Her extended stay away from Nigeria, it turned out, was to enable her to shop in grand style for the wedding of her son, Yusuf, who got married back in August this year. Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport (MAKIA) was reported to have hosted the largest assembly of private aircraft ever on that occasion, as Nigeria literarily emptied to Kano for the event. The wedding had been presaged by lavish bachelors and spinsters parties where money in different currencies and denominations were allegedly freely thrown around.

When he turned 60 same August this year, Godwin Emefiele, governor of the nation’s exchequer, hosted a very expensive and exclusive birthday party in the Caribbean Island nation of Jamaica. The creme de la creme in Nigeria’s banking and finance industry attended the event. The fact that Nigeria’s foreign debt profile is on the northward ascendancy, nudging in the direction of $40 billion, and the nation’s currency has been on a free fall in recent months, was not sobering enough for Emefiele to put the event on hold. The Aliko Dangotes, Tony Elumelus, Herbert Wigwes, Nduka Obaigbenas, and so on, flew into Montego Bay in Jamaica for the event. This is just as inflation figures jumped to 17.33% in February 2021, from 16.47%, in January, under Emefiele’s watch.

Happily, there is been no media spin as yet, insinuating that Wike and company were found with caches of state funds which they were attempting to stow away in distant vaults. If it was all about a breezy trip to wherever it may be, for whatever genuine reasons, the governors haven’t overshot their boundaries. Whatsoever people may say, these are chief executives of their various geopolitical entities who are entitled to freedom of movement and association, anywhere in the world. They are authorised by law to prospect for opportunities for growth and development in their domains and are responsible to those who elected them into office.

Nigeria’s iconic radical musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in a situation such as this, would most probably have said: *second base, o jare.* This would translate as “please say something else if there’s nothing more to spice the matter on ground”.

Olusunle (PhD) is a poet, media practitioner, scholar, author, and member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE)