BETWEEN November 15, 1884 and February 26, 1885, a group of colonial murderers and economic saboteurs met in Berlin and partitioned Africa among themselves. They considered it beneath their dignity to invite African leaders, the authorities set over the lands and resources they aimed to plunder, to what they gratuitously called the Congo Conference. In all of their history the whites had never consented to such degrading treatment—Europe’s night between 500 and 1500 AD had been one long stretch of coups and counter coups—but the Black (wo)man was a lower specie, even though Black resources were such a delight.
At the end of the conference, France and the UK emerged the biggest thieves, sharing West Africa, the choicest part of Africa, between themselves. Portugal pilfered Mozambique and Angola; Germany seized Namibia and Tanzania; Italy stole Somalia and a portion of Ethiopia, and Spain grabbed Equatorial Guinea. Belgium and its Leopold II, a man literally drunk with the blood of Blacks, millions of whom he slaughtered in Central Africa, took the Democratic Republic of Congo. The despoliation of the land of Ham was complete.
Literature by its very nature shaves a man’s head in his absence, but politics exercising that luxury necessarily forges a fountain of tears. This week’s Abuja Conference, ostensibly convoked to douse the festering flames in Nigeria’s Rivers State, effectively recreated the odious Congo Conference. Convened by the chief priest of Nigeria’s perverse, pestilential politics, the conference rolled out colonial decrees: 1. ALL matters instituted in the courts by the Governor of Rivers State, Sir Fubara, and his team, in respect of the political crisis in Rivers State, shall be withdrawn IMMEDIATELY. 2. ALL impeachment proceedings initiated against the Governor of Rivers State by the Rivers State House of Assembly should be dropped immediately. 3. The leadership of the Rivers State House of Assembly as led by the Rt. Hon. Martin Amaewhule shall be recognised alongside the 27 members who resigned from the PDP. 4. The remunerations and benefits of ALL members of the Rivers State House of Assembly and their staff must be reinstated immediately and the Governor of Rivers State shall henceforth not interfere with the full funding of the Rivers State House of Assembly. 5. The Rivers State House of Assembly shall choose where they want to sit and conduct their legislative business without interference and/or hindrance from the Executive arm of government. 6. The Governor of Rivers State, Sir Fubara, shall re-present the state budget to a properly constituted Rivers State House of Assembly. 7 The names of ALL commissioners in the Rivers State Executive Council who resigned their appointments because of the political crisis in the state should be resubmitted to the House of Assembly for approval.
It is clear that this “peace deal”, about which there is nothing peaceful, is all about the 2027 ambitions of its authors, and nothing else. It is the most blatant, in-your-face colonial heist I have seen since the return to civil rule. The authors did not even pretend to care about Rivers people: it was all about their vaulting ambitions. Yet I must ask these godless, infernally arrogant rogues: is tomorrow in your hands? Nyesom Wike, Minister of Interior, is doing his level best to chain down the state that gave him the ticket to serve as LG boss, minister and two-term governor, a retinue of cheerleaders behind him. You see, 2027 politics is underway even though the landlords thrust upon Government Houses during the 2023 polls have only managed to wreck our lives, a damnable cast of crooks for whom power is simply an instrument of torture. With many still crying that their votes were cast for workers but read for congressmen, the Governor of Abuja is preparing the ground for a final assault on Rivers State to secure the privileges he currently enjoys while acting like a sailor declaring war on the sea waves. To preserve his “structure,” the Abuja lord does not mind draining his river, lodged in the clouds where money, power and flattery have placed him, a modern-day Antiochus.
The would-be governor of Abuja-Rivers is a metaphor for the criminal decadence of Nigerian politics. Insufferably arrogant, horrendously uncivil and indeed even sartorially inelegant, Wike has quickly unravelled as a knave, his strident clamour for southern presidency ahead of the last ballot having been nothing more than a self-promotion gimmick. Southern presidency and Yorubalokan occupy the same matrix of powerlust, driven by intellectual and moral perversions. As governor, Wike tongue-lashed traditional rulers, demolished the livelihoods of people under the guise of preserving COVID-19 protocols, and even decreed instant detention for the manager of the Rivers State DisCo, a man on essential duties doing his best to supply Rivers people with electricity while COVID-19 raged.
In 2020, addressing traditional rulers at the Rivers Government House, Wike barked a foul order: “Stop shaking your head! That’s sycophancy!” Among those rulers were people old enough to be his father but he did not care. He then called a traditional ruler, the custodian of his people’s heritage, “a small boy,” saying: “You are one of those causing problems! They gave you chieftaincy but you are a young boy so you don’t even know what to do with it. And then when I’m speaking you are shaking your head like this because you think I will be happy. All fake! Fake!!. You just go and wear something that is bigger than you. When someone is looking for power–you’d think he’s an elderly person. Very small young man… this boy. I know when I was in school, he was running around us, going on errands. Now he’s dressing Usman Dan Fodio. Then he begins to breach protocol.”
Wike has since morphed into a monster, desperately struggling to attain royal status like Tinubu in Lagos, and eager to govern two states at once. Now, by the terms of the Abuja “peace deal”, the errand boys planted in the Rivers cabinet and the legislature to guarantee Wike’s continued dictatorship in 2027 are to be restored to their former positions in defiance of law and logic. Rights activist, Ann-Kio Briggs, cut to the chase: “You cannot have a governor, a sitting governor, and then you have a minister supervising the sitting governor.” But that was what happened in Lagos and eventually paved the way for Tinubu’s presidency, and it is the atrocity Wike is desperately trying to replicate.
Dorothy Hoffner, a 104-year-old overreacher, recently died after jumping 13,500 feet from a plane in Ottawa. She broke the world record for the oldest skydiver, but her bones now lie under the earth. Let the power-drunk remember the power-drowned. If the Rivers people do not rise against colonialism, they will be plundered by pirates till there is no river in sight.
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