Rivers Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, has accused a senator of attempting to prevent members of the Senate Adhoc Committee on Refinery Maintenance from visiting him as a customary gesture.
News About Nigeria reports that the governor did not name the accused senator.
Though the senator’s identity isn’t directly mentioned, sources suggest it is Senator Barry Mpigi, who hails from Rivers Southeast, the district where Fubara is from.
Mpigi is known to be aligned with Nyesom Wike, the Federal Capital Territory Minister, in the state’s political divide between the Wike and Fubara factions.
During the visit by the Senate Adhoc Committee, led by Senator Patrick Ifeanyi Uba, to inspect the Port Harcourt Refinery’s maintenance progress, Senator Mpigi was notably absent when the committee paid respects to Governor Fubara at the Government House.
During the visit, Governor Fubara criticised the current trend of bitter politics in the state.
Fubara said: “I am aware that this is not the actual number of members of this committee. You are more than this. I am also aware that the senator representing, unfortunately, my senatorial district, didn’t want you to come here.
“But because you are men of integrity: the real ones, who have integrity; you decided to come and do what is right. God will bless you.
“What you are doing is the right thing. Politics is a business of interest. Your worse enemy today can become your best friend tomorrow. It’s a business of interest. But the interest of the people should come first.
“Unfortunately, some people think it is something that has to do with life or death. And that is one mistake everybody makes when you take this business outside of the normal principles and rules.”
“Our government has no business with politics of bitterness because we have the interest of our people at heart. We take their wellbeing as our priority because that is why they gave us the mandate to govern them. So, their interest, which is the interest of the State, comes first in our scheme of things.”
Fubara warned that anybody disrespecting a man in authority, either for his age or status, could succeed temporarily, but such insults would boomerang with greater and bigger pain.
He said, “We might be a state, as being presented, that we have issues. But we don’t have any issues. Our eyes are on the ball to deliver for our people. Even in the face of this deliberate distraction, we will not fail our people because at the end, it is the impact we make on our people that counts.”
Fubara is having a running battle with Nyesom Wike, presumably over the political structure in the state.
