Still on Necessity of Intervention in Rivers and the Burden of Leadership in Times of Crisis
By Abu Najakku
“When the revolutionaries become the establishment, they become the counter-revolution” – unknown
Alhaji Tanimu Yakubu Kurfi is one of the most brilliant economists from Northern Nigeria, having obtained a degree in economics and master of business administration from Wagner College, New York, the United States of America. Yakubu has come a long way as the founding president of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS). Since then, he has been many things: chief economist and principal investment adviser, Afri-Projects Consortium; commissioner of finance, budget and economic planning, Katsina State from 1999 to 2003; the managing director, Federal Mortgage Bank; deputy chief of staff and chief economic adviser to late President Umar Musa Yar’adua from 2007 to 2010. Tanimu Yakubu had also served in the R & D and capital issues and investment division of Icon Merchant Bank. In 2015, he was appointed a non-executive director of Oando Plc. In June last year, President Bola Tinubu appointed Tanimu Yakubu as the Director General of the budget office. So, Tanimu’s grey hair is vindicated by the knowledge of economics he has shared over the years with his employers across the private and public sectors of this careworn country.
Nonetheless, Tanimu Yakubu’s essay with above title published last week in the Nigerian media failed to justify the “necessity of intervention in Rivers” or prove that in declaring the state of emergency in that state, President Tinubu has truly discharged “the burden of leadership.” To be sure, section 305 of the Nigerian constitution which the president invoked has empowered him to declare emergency if any of the four different conditions is met, but there’s nowhere it provides for the summary dismissal of the elected executive and legislature of the state concerned. There is NO section of the Nigerian constitution that empowers the president to remove an elected governor and members of the state house of assembly. The only section that allows for the removal of those two institutions is section 188 and it’s well outside the president’s competence. In declaring emergency rule in Rivers, the president invoked section 305 of the constitution and not section 188, wherefrom then did he derive the power to remove Governor Fubara and members of the Rivers State House of Assembly?
Undoubtedly then, the removal of Governor Fubara and members of the RVHA by president Tinubu in a rather drab media address, is a scandalous abuse of power. As many discerning Nigerians have observed, the declaration of emergency in Rivers state is nothing but a desperate partisan power grab to further the cause of President Tinubu’s desperation for a second term. Having seen that his man Friday, the minister of the federal capital territory, Nyesom Ezenwo Wike, and his faction of the Rivers State House of Assembly had failed to remove the elected governor, Siminalayi Fubara, President Tinubu did it himself, under the cover of emergency rule. Nigerians understand this frantic move to mean that the re-election campaign has started and Tinubu is determined to control the resources and political destiny of Rivers state in his bid to win another presidential term in 2027. There is no other way to explain this manner of emergency rule in Rivers. This is not statesmanship. This is partisan gamesmanship. This is not altruism. This is crass opportunism. This is a self-serving political maneuvre.
It’s more difficult and painful to accept that emergency rule is “inevitable’ when you remember that as opposition leader, Tinubu had thoroughly condemned President Olusegun Obasanjo and President Goodluck Jonathan for taking similar measures in Ekiti and Plateau states and Adamawa, Borno and Yobe states, respectively. Unlike any other, President Jonathan’s declaration of emergency in the latter three states was much more considerate in that he left the governors and the members of the states’ houses of assembly in place.
Still, the then opposition leader, Tinubu, did not spare Jonathan. “The body language of the Jonathan administration leads any keen watcher of events with unmistakable conclusion of the existence of a surreptitious but barely disguised intention to muzzle the elected governments of these states for what is clearly a display of unpardonable mediocrity and diabolic partisanship geared towards 2015. This government now wants to use the excuse of the security challenges faced by the governors to remove them from the states considered hostile to the 2015 PDP/Jonathan project……No governor of a state in Nigeria is indeed the chief security officer.”
In the words quoted above, you can justifiably replace the name Jonathan with Tinubu, PDP with APC and 2015 with 2027!
Assessing the political atmosphere further, Tinubu added in the same statement: “This government, through act of omission and commission, has fallen far short of expectation. It actively encourages schisms and all manner of divisive tendencies for parochial expediency. Ethnicity and religion become handy weapons of domination. Things have never been this BAD.”
Schisms based on ethnicity and religion? Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Suddenly, in 2025, under a Muslim/Muslim president and vice president, people in the South West are shouting: ‘The Sultan is not our religious leader. We will not allow Shari’a courts in Yoruba neson,” etc. Who said the Sultan is your leader? And what can you do about Shari’a courts meant for Muslims (only) when this has long ago been negotiated and accommodated in the constitution? And what’s this ‘tour’ of the North by that dumb boy, Seyi Tinubu, who was said to have shared cooked meals and paid courtesy calls and held secret audience with power-hungry Muslim clerics?
As if he foresaw the mess he will create in 2017, the then opposition leader Tinubu continued: “The president’s pronouncement, which seeks to abridge or has the potential of totally scuttling the constitutional functions of governors and other elected representatives of the people, will be counter-productive in the long run.’
Thereafter, he invited Nigerians to judge: “Any measure put in place which alienate the people, in particular their elected representatives, should be considered as fundamentally defective by every right-thinking person in the country.”
Well, there are still millions of right-thinking Nigerians who believe that if President Jonathan’s declaration of emergency (even though he left the elected governors and state legislatures to continue doing their job) was BAD, then the imposition of emergency in Rivers state by president Tinubu is WORSE.
According to Anne Bradstreet, “Authority without wisdom is like a heavy axe without an edge, fitter to bruise than polish.”
And to demonstrate his contempt for the rule of law as well as the fact that the declaration of this emergency in Rivers is about resources, the Tinubu government has gone ahead to release to sole administrator, Admiral Ibokette Ibas, the federal allocations meant for the state. I thought the supreme court had forbidden the release of that money until an appropriation act had been formally enacted. In the days ahead, we will be watching the sole administrator’s appointments and how and who he picks to run the local governments, as well as his use of the state’s funds put under his care.
I appreciate the increasing pressure on Tinubu’s appointees from Northern Nigeria to defend his cruel economic and political policies, but bad policies are simply indefensible especially when they’re taken in bad faith. Firstly, many of these Tinubu appointees from the North are unpopular; secondly, they lack electoral value, and thirdly, they’re mired in allegations of corruption. What regard do common people in the North have for such divisive and hated figures as Abdullahi Ganduje, or Atiku Bagudu or Bello Matawalle?
These persons are some of the ugly faces of Tinubu’s government of hardship, poverty and hopelessness. The thoughtless removal of petrol subsidy, floating the Naira and the resultant inflation have caused an unprecedented cost of living crisis among the people. So, no amount of casuistry by the likes of Tanimu Yakubu Kurfi can change the narrative that the emergency declared in Rivers is the peak of a soap opera carefully produced and directed from Aso Villa.
Meanwhile, there have been long standing claims that Tanimu Yakubu Kurfi had used his office as chief economic adviser to late President Yar’adua to block the continuation of the power projects started by President Obasanjo because he wanted to bring in his nominated contractors to do the job. In the same vein, he was alleged to have sabotaged the $8.3 billion railway modernization project that President Olusegun Obasanjo had arranged with China Civil Engineering and Construction Company back in in 2006, because again, he wanted to assign the job to his preferred contactor. Yakubu was equally blamed for the delay in the renegotiation and renewal of the oil mining licenses of Shell and other IOCs in 2009 for the same reasons as above. It is inconceivable that after failing to address these serious allegations of sabotage, Tanimu Kurfi could rush to defend president Tinubu’s illegal and unjust declaration of emergency rule in Rivers.
As the director general of the federal budget office, one would like to hear from Tanimu Yakubu Kurfi how the Tinubu government is funding its ‘legacy projects’ as well as those it has inherited. What’s the latest news with the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano (AKK) gas evacuation pipeline project? Is it true that in 2023 this government had NO money to continue the rehabilitation of the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano highway? What has happened to the so-called East-West Road and why has it been abandoned? From where is the Tinubu government sourcing money to begin the two white elephant projects called Lagos-Calabar and Sokoto-Badagry highways? Is it true that Nigeria doesn’t even have the money to construct these highways and will have to rely on “foreign” funding? Indeed, what’s the price tag for the Sokoto-Badagry highway?
How about the Kano-Katsina dual carriageway? Where are we with the Kano-Maiduguri Road? What is the matter with the Abuja-Minna Road contract? Why has it stalled?
Why is Tanimu Kurfi not talking about an important project like the Abuja-Lokoja-Itakpe railway? Why can’t we have Abuja-Keffi rail line that will help remove the multitude of people and goods plying that chaotic road? What’s the state of the Kaduna-Kano railway project and when will it be completed? What about the Lagos-Ibadan leg of the rail modernization project, when will it be connected with Kano? Last year, the minister of the FCT, Nyesom Ezenwo Wike, had promised that he would complete the Abuja city railway for president Tinubu to commission, why did he fail and why is he and everyone else silent about it? Don’t these people believe in Abuja again?
These are some of the important national projects for which Nigerians would like to hear from Tanimu Kurfi. We want to hear him explain what has been budgeted for them and why. But for Tanimu Yakubu Kurfi to jump into the debate on the justification for emergency rule in Rivers when there are more important issues on his plate is a disservice to his office and our country. This argument for emergency in Rivers should be left to the 12-man all male army of spokespersons of President Tinubu.
Thus far, we’ve not seen the expert politician, Bola Tinubu, directing state affairs with finesse and elegance. What we see are early warnings of agbero democracy and this has so far been deployed in Lagos, Kano and now Rivers state with the sole purpose of elbowing out other democratic forces, notwithstanding the cost to the president’s democratic credentials. The emergency he has declared in Rivers is a betrayal of the people, including those who have looked up to him as an astute and fair-minded and veteran politician fully in the present. It’s like President Tinubu is suffused in forgetfulness. He cannot remember the past or harmonize it with the present.
Here’s a call to all those who wrote statements that Bola Tinubu had signed and circulated when he was opposition leader to place the files before him to guide the remainder of his unfolding and risky presidency. It’s such a shame that this president is implementing the mediocre versions of the same policies he had condemned without anybody to remind him. The likes of Tunde Rahman, Sunday Dare, Bayo Onanuga, to mention a few, whose job is becoming more and more difficult, must replay his old harmonies for his listening pleasure and hold the mirror for president Tinubu. Right now, he has a sullen image which his dozen spokespersons may not be able to clean. Tanimu Yakubu is well advised to concentrate on his budget job and leave the task of cleaning president Tinubu’s partisan political mess to his army of spokespersons.
Abu Najakku, 19, Kofar Kola, Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi State (0807 711 2077)
