All those people out there
speculating on the motives of the Rivers State Governor, Mr. Nyesom Wike, and
condemning him for ordering the arrest of the 22 ExxonMobil staff who flouted
the executive order signed by the governor to stop the movement of people from
other states into Rivers in order to check the spread of coronavirus in the
state should hide their faces in shame and thoroughly interrogate themselves to
determine whether they are not labouring under the usual debilitating
inferiority complex that often pushes some “natives” to prefer to endanger
their people’s lives in order to please the “White Massa”?
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| Gov Wike |
If it were some “ordinary” people
from Akwa-Ibom that were arrested for breaching the law in Rivers State, would
there have been any uproar? Would that have earned even a footnote mention in
the media? I can imagine what will be the fate of some workers of a Nigerian
company operating in the United States who chose to brazenly flout a movement
restriction order in the state of Texas, the home of ExxonMobil, for whatever
reason!
Addressing a press conference in
Port Harcourt on Friday, April 17, Wike said: “Security agencies arrested 22
staff of Exxon Mobil who came into the state from neighbouring Akwa Ibom State
in violation of the extant Executive Order restricting movement into the state.
We do not know the coronavirus status of these individuals. Even though
security agencies advised that they be allowed to go back to Akwa Ibom State, I
insisted that the law must take its course. This is because nobody is above the
law. As a responsive government, we have quarantined them in line with the
relevant health protocols and they will be charged to court.”
Certainly, this is how civilized
and rule-governed societies are run. There are no set of laws for the masses
and another set for some gaggle of privileged lawbreakers.
Certainly, Wike’s action has not
gone down well with the Presidency, and he appears to be under pressure to
reverse it. But he appears undaunted.
“People in Abuja are not happy
[but] I don’t take order from Abuja but from Rivers people,” he told the
reporters at the press conference.
Earlier on April 7, another of
such incidents capable of undermining efforts being deployed to contain the
coronovirus challenge occurred and Wike’s reaction was still very appropriate,
in my opinion. “Two pilots of Carveton Helicopters flew in and landed at the
Air Force Base Port Harcourt with 10 (ten) passengers on board their Twin-Otter
Helicopter without any prior notice or approval from the State Government and
in clear breach of the extant COVID-19 Regulations and Executive
Order. The pilots and 10 passengers were promptly arrested by security
personnel and arraigned before the Port Harcourt Chief Magistrate Court in two
separate charges,” the governor reported.
Now, the two incidents appear to
have unduly tasked the patience of Abuja which wasted no time in registering
its disapproval in a very practical, albeit infantile and unsightly way. The
Inspector of General of Police, Mr. Mohammed Adamu, has ordered the immediate
removal of the Rivers State Commissioner of Police, Mr. Mustapha Dandura, whose
offence appears to be that his men had assisted the governor to enforce the
executive order for safeguarding the health of Rivers people. Mr. Dandura had
personally accompanied Gov Wike to effect the arrest of the two Caverton
Helicopter Pilots and their 10 passengers and that may have worsened his case.
He has now been replaced by Joseph Mukan and it is left to be seen whether the
new police commissioner is coming with a brief to work at cross purposes with
the governor on the control of the spread of Covid-19.
This is the kind of country in
which we have found ourselves, where leaders exhort us to do something, but do
some other thing that clearly contradicts what they had told us to do. A few
days after President Muhammadu Buhari’s speech sermonizing on the determination
and zeal his regime was investing to wage a principled war against
Covid-19, Daily Independent (of Tuesday, March 31) carried a
front page lead story on 26 Americans who had come into the country through the
Murtala Mohammed International Airport and headed to Calabar with a local
flight without being screened.
Now, the question is: who
cleared the trip of these Americans to Nigeria and why were there no health
officials stationed on ground to screen them and ensure they were quarantined
for 14 days before being allowed to fly to Calabar? Is it because they
are Americans or clients of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC),
and by implication, the federal government, or both? Does that
automatically exempt any of them from being a carrier of the virus which is
presently ravaging their own country?
What kind of government claims to
be fighting a deadly virus with one hand and using the other to be undermining
the efforts being deployed by dutiful and committed health workers who are
putting their lives on the line to contain it? Indeed, how principled and
serious-minded are the leaders piloting the affairs of this country?
I am writing this piece on Saturday
and I have just watched the proceedings of the burial of the president’s late
Chief of Staff, Mr. Abba Kyari. On April 3, Information Minister, Mr. Lai
Mohammed, was reported to have said that patients who died of coronavirus would
not be released to their families for burial (because of the danger such
corpses might to pose to the health of the living). He said such corpses are
the property of the federal government and would be disposed of by agents of
the Federal Ministry of Health specially trained to do so.
But what Nigerians saw on Saturday
was exactly a contradiction of this unambiguous policy statement. First, the
corpse was flown from Lagos to Abuja, endangering the lives of those who
conveyed and received it. Presidential spokesman, Garba Shehu had announced
that it would be a private burial. But the direct opposite was the case.
The burial was aired on television and the crowd will not, in my
estimation, be less than 200. This is a brazen violation of the extant crowd
control policy of government which stipulates that no gathering should exceed
20 people.
Everything about “social distancing” was rudely flouted with
utmost impunity. It was as if there was a deliberate effort to spread
coronavirus. The people stood very close to each other. As Kyari’s body
was being interred by those kitted with Personal Protective Equipment (PPE),
some people came too close to the covid-19 infested corpse (something that is
totally inadvisable) and at some point, it was like some of them even touched
the body. What kind of an unserious people are we that honour the dead at the
expense of the safety of the living? Finally, he was buried in a
very shallow grave at a public cemetery, another disaster planted and left to
soon explode!
I just hope that all the people that
attended that burial were not allowed to go home from there to go
and contribute their own effort to further spread Covid-19? I hope they were
all moved from there into isolation for the mandatory 14 days?
Else, all that has been done so far to contain the escalation of the virus in
the country can be said to have been wantonly sabotaged. After exacerbating the
coronavirus situation, they will elongate the excruciating lockdown to further
torment the hapless citizens and return to their boundless provisions,
limitless luxuries and comfort procured with public funds.
One can go on citing several other
examples of insufferable demonstrations of irresponsibility by our leaders
which can only complicate the coronovirus crisis. That is why I fully support
the insistence of Governor Nyesom Wike that everyone, highly or lowly placed,
should obey his executive order restricting movements into his state. Rivers is
not the only state that has instituted this kind of law, but it does seem that
it is the only one that is very unyielding on its insistence that there should
be no exceptions to the rule. Coronavirus is not a joke. The number of infected
persons keeps climbing in Nigeria now that the country has increased her ability
to test more people. Gov. Wike should therefore not allow the federal
government and its equally lawless clients and friends to come in to compound
the Covid-19 situation in his state.
Well-meaning Nigerians are hoping
that 2023 will mark an end to authoritarian style of governance in Nigeria so
we can salvage our badly corrupted federal system in which governors are often
viewed and even treated by the federal government as some inferior subordinates
it can order about at will. The era of federal agents thinking they could walk
into any state and treat state laws with disdain will soon be over. But we
should glad that even as bad as things are now, there are governors who are
helping the overbearing federal power to confine itself within the boundaries
allowed it by the sterling tenets of democratic practice.
It is a huge disappointment that a
group like PENGASSON is supporting the action of the ExxonMobil staff and
berating Wike for curtailing their excesses. What this shows is that despite a
lot of grandstanding out there, many pressure groups operating in a democratic
and rule-governed dispensation are pathetically estranged from democratic
culture. Most worrisome is the caliber of politicians we have in this country
today. Many of them do not even understand politics beyond riding on its back
to obtain meal tickets. These constitute grave danger to our democracy.
Nigerians must all resolve to weed out all these anti-democratic elements in
order to reclaim and purify our democratic space.
*Ugocukwu
Ejinkeonye is a Nigerian Journalist and Writer. He writes a column on the back
page of Daily
Independent newspaper every Monday. (scruples2006@yahoo.com; @ugowrite.)
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