The wooing of Wike

Sir: The 2022 edition of the PDP presidential nomination may be the first time Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, who has held elective and appointive political offices since 1999, fails in a political contest.

Unlike some others across the ruling APC and the main opposition PDP that used their participation in the respective presidential primaries of their parties as pretexts to profiteering in some other political businesses, Wike was decidedly among few that really meant what he expressed interest for.

While his fellow party men and women watch with awe or wallow in whining, Wike, typical of Nigerian politicians of gargantuan affluence and influence, has been a protagonist in installing and dethroning PDP leaders and deciding what’s what and who’s who in the party in recent time. He was the prime factor behind the emergence of his kinsman Uche Secondus as the PDP’s national chairman against the popular wishes in the party that the position is occupied by a party faithful from the south-west.

One of the natural accompaniments of those with towering personalities is that their actions, commendable or condemnable, successful or unsuccessful, are full of newsworthiness. That is why Wike’s loss to former Vice President Atiku Abubakar is still rippling with recurrent headlines. In fact, he has been made to become a beautiful bride.

The wooing of Wike, especially by those in the opposing camp, can best be understood in an analogical situation whereby some men schemed with desperation to manoeuver one another as to who sympathise more with a widow they were salivating over her alluring look when the husband was alive.

In many instances, the first interest of the men winking at the widow neither lies in the worrisome status of the woman’s widowhood nor in filling the gap of the lost companionship but to satisfy their time-long lascivious interest, which they put in check when the lady was under another man’s roof.

Since his venture into politics in the early 1990s, Atiku, who defeated Wike and others to get the PDP’s flag for the 2023 presidential election, had won a few times and failed many times. The strength or weakness of one that fails is seen in the ability not to fall along with the failure. One distinguishing factor behind Atiku’s political fecundity that could favourably factor in for him in his further political contest is his resilience. Wike can learn from that.

• Nsikak Ekanem sent this article from Lagos via nsikak4media@gmail.com