The Coordinator, South-South Leadership Forum, Anabs Sara-Igbe, has said Rivers State Governor Siminalayi Fubara offered to resign his position before his rift with the Minister of FCT, Nyesom Wike, escalated.
Mr Sara-Igbe, who stated this during an interview on Channels TV, said it took the intervention of some Peoples Democratic Party leaders to prevail on him to shelve the idea.
According to him, the governor opted to resign because some forces were preventing him from asserting his powers.
The Niger Delta leader, who is also a former security adviser to former Governor Peter Odili, predicted that more commissioners would leave Mr Fubara’s cabinet because the minister’s loyalists dominated the administration.
He alleged that even after leaving office, Mr Wike still had a say in government operations and how the governor was managing the affairs of the state.
“What is the problem? Wike has come to tell the world that he was fighting Sim because Sim wanted to take his structure. What is the structure six months after elections; we are not close to elections, so what has structure got to do?
“Let me tell you about the structure; before Wike left government, the state was making over N10bn internally generated revenue (monthly). When he left, the IGR came down to N6bn.
“And the governor, a former Accountant General of the state, asked questions, and in the process, he engaged somebody to look at the books, and the commissioner of finance reported to Wike, and the former governor got angry. That is the structure.
“Secondly, the money coming from the federation account, Wike tied the money to one project or the other. So, when the money comes, it goes to the banks and they collect theirs from it and pay the contractors. Of course, we didn’t even know the cost of the contracts, so when this governor felt, ‘how will I run a government when I don’t have the resources?
“The minister became hostile to the governor, and the governor said, ‘Okay, let me resign if that is the case’. The PDP elders prevailed on him not to resign, thinking it would be messy.
“As soon as that ended, I came on air and advised Nyesom Wike to leave this man alone to govern; allow him, even if he’s your son’. I even went as far as giving him references like the Sarakis. Dr Olusola Saraki brought the son, Bukola, to that seat, but when their ideologies did not agree, the son told him to go and rest.
He added that it was difficult to make a governor subservient in Nigeria because of the huge influence and power available to the occupiers of the office.
“You cannot make somebody a governor; a very important seat in Nigeria – that was the seat Odili sat and he almost became the president; that was the seat (former governor Rotimi) Amaechi sat and he connived with others to remove a sitting president; that is the seat Wike himself sat and became a superman—and you are asking somebody who is on that seat to be subservient. But the governor is still loyal,” he said.
