How many people noticed how Governor Abdulrahman Abdulrasaq of Kwara State gave the garrulous Nyesom Wike, Federal Capital Territory Minister, the silent treatment over the attacks on the former? The governor refused to dignify him with a response. Yoruba describe such people as “a da ke ja”(silent fighter).
When a non-ruling party minister takes a swipe at the duo of the Chairman of the Governors Forum and Hope Uzodinma, the Chairman of APC Governors Forum, it’s seen as an attack on the president.
If you want a description of what is called “political slow poison,” Governor Abdulrasaq fits in. Fear those who are phlegmatic. They don’t talk but move stealthily like war drones, with devastating effects. Whatever that petulant guy claims he plans against Abdulrasaq in Kwara is dead on arrival.
The garrulous guy has an exaggerated sense of himself. After the Osun governorship election, he irreverently boasted that if the president had wanted to win the election at all costs, he (Wike) would have been in Osun and Adeleke wouldn’t have won. Apart from the fact that that statement was unflattering to the president to the extent that he could manipulate the election if he was determined to win it, he equally collectively insulted all the APC governors who converged on Osun, saying that they were incapable of rigging the election in the president’s favour. I hope the president realizes the internal schism that this guy’s meddlesomeness could cause within the party’s ranks.
Even as a sitting governor in 2023 and despite all the electoral jiggery-pokery of mutilated results, he couldn’t get PBAT 50 per cent of the presidential votes in Rivers State. Out of 500,000 votes, he only managed to garner 231,000 votes for the APC.
Tinubu is a smart politician. He would rather trust an Abdulrasaq, who fought from the outside to dislodge the Saraki dynasty with his “O to ge” political tomahawk, to an egregious interloper, inured in megalomaniacal hubris, who is alien to the dynamics of Kwara politics.
While I would be the one to admit that Wike has done relatively well in FCT, there are some other Ministers too, like Olubunmi Ojo, who are doing well in their respective ministries but don’t overreach themselves, even as party men, in contrast to Wike’s excesses.
Just like Jesus rebuked Simon Peter for cutting off the ear of the high priest’s servant with his sword because of him, the president needs to rein in the FCT minister, who, figuratively, is cutting off the ear of the president’s loyalists with his vituperation.
He ought to have learnt his lesson from his encounter with the young, cool-headed but firm Lt. Yerima, a situation that saw the aggressor sauntering away in disgrace with his tail between his legs.