The caretaker committee chairman of the All Progressives Congress in Rivers state, Tony Okocha, has said that the plan by President Bola Tinubu, to resolve the rift between Governor Siminalayi Fubara and the Minister of Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike, has failed.
Okocha who made this claim while addressing a press conference at the APC National Secretariat in Abuja, on Thursday, December 14, 2023, said Tinubu’s reconciliation move has fallen flat.
The APC Chieftain who spoke, following the developments in the state, including the peace move by the President, to end the strained relationship between Fubara and Wike, said: “I wasn’t part of it, but whatever that was it, has broken down, and it has been broken irreconcilably.”
According to him, the four members of the state House of Assembly, led by the divisive Speaker Edison Ehie, were focusing on criminality, noting that their actions would not be tolerated as they sat and approved the budget that Governor Fubara had offered them for the fiscal year 2024.
Okocha however claimed that the APC was wooing Wike to defect to the party, noting that as soon as he became a member of the APC, he would become the leader of the party in Rivers state.
It would be recalled that President Tinubu recently held a meeting with Wike and Fubara at the presidential villa Abuja, to reconcile the two political figures from the oil-producing state.
However, the issue took another twist in the last four days, as 27 PDP lawmakers from the state Assembly, who are Wike’s loyalists, defected to the APC, citing crisis within the party’s structure and maladministration in the state, as the reasons for their defection.
Similarly, there was another twist with the demolition of the state House of Assembly Complex while the public outcry for the declaration of the defected members’ seats vacant was still ongoing.
