It may be fitting to say that it is not only those who have three stars embossed on their epaulet on military fatigue that should be reserved the honor of being addressed with the prefix, General before their name is mentioned.
Certain exploits or happenings around ones existential reality could foist the appellation and make it apposite for the person to be so addressed.
Rivers Governor, General (Sir) Sim Fubara unarguably is one of such persons who circumstances around them have aptly put in the enviable position to be addressed as General even without knowing the position of a trigger on a gun!
A little over a year and half in office as Governor, Fubara has weathered some terrific tempestuous storms even with a little knowledge as a budding politician and is still standing strong and making very solid impacts in governance.
The Governor did not even have the luxury of sitting well in office before the storm was orchestrated from very blind angles and it looked as if it would rock the boat and sink the Governor and his team.
The force propelling the storm is such that brooks no appeasement, but persistently gathering more forces in its murderous mission to terminate the life of an emerging administraton.
But since conventional warfare is not always won on the battlefield, Governor Fubara deployed Fabian tactics of not frontally confronting the enemies which has so far neutralized all the arsenals of the daredevil traducers primed against him.
The Federal Capital Territory,FCT minister, Nyesom Wike who it was that yielded the office of Governor to Fubara, but now the arrow head of the forces seeking the scalp of the Rivers Governor is now apparently like an Octopus of some sort. Many politicians, even those older in age, exposure and even influence defer to him and flock around him.
Wike it was who torpedoed the presidential ambition of former vice president, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar in last year’s general election with the active support of members of the G-5 Governors ably led by him.
Till date, Wike ls still having the leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP in his pocket and calling the shots without anyone bathing eyebrows. The minister is like a moving train which noone can stop and he believes that with him everything is possible.
Faced with Fubara, a career civil servant with no political pedigree, Wike would have assumed that he would lick the Opobo born Governor like a plate of pepper soup and discard the plate. But every attempt so far by the minister to pull the rug off the feet of Fubara has failed.
It started with the impeachment plot where the minister had a clear advantage. But the impeachment went awry. The battle thereafter shifted to the grassroots at the local government level, Fubara also took the upper hand and is now in full control of the 319 political wards in the state with 23 local government chairman as his foot soldiers.
All the roadblocks erected by Wike and his allies to ensure that the local government election did not hold fell flat. Even the court offered them no refuge as it dismissed their application to nullify the election.
What they thought would be their joker or game changer was their application to stop the statutory monthly allocation of the state.
Justice Joyce Abdulmalik of the Federal High Court Abuja had given them a false hope when she ruled that the state allocation should be suspended as they applied pending the re-presentation of the state 2024 budget to the Wike allies in the House of Assembly.
However that hope was short-lived as Justice Hamma Barka of the appellate court invalidated the High Court ruling presided over Justice Abdulmalik’.
Again, Wike and his gang came back with a bloody nose. Their last hope is hanging precariously on the pending defection suit which may ultimately end up at the Supreme Court.
Even there at the apex court, the learned justices would merely interprete the provisions of section 109 (1) g as it concerns switching political parties when there is no crisis or division within the original political party of the defectors.
Even a lay man knows that the 27 pro-Wike lawmakers who defected from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP to the All Progressive Congress, APC, goofed in their action.
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It smacks of irrationality and clear stupidity for one to run berserk and abandon an abode with all the comfort of life into a heavy downpour and get drenched, yet claiming that rain never fell. But the whole body is evidently dripling with water.
That explains the fate of the pro- Wike lawmakers who publicly announced their defection from PDP to the APC and went further to authenticate their defection with a sworn affidavit but later recanted that they never defected.
So sometimes some Generals do not necessarily win wars by the strength of their firepower, but by some element of benevolent spirits backing up their war plan and setting confusion in the camp of the enemy. The Fubara -Wike confrontation may not be an exception.
Already, prediction of victory for Fubara has started coming from some informed quarters. Former president Good luck Jonathan waved that victory flag recently at Etche when he told Gov. Fubara that he would emerge as a General by the time the fight between him and Wike would be over.
Following on the heels of Jonathan, the Ijaw Youth Council, IYC, worldwide led by its president presented the award of Grassroots General of the Ijaw ethnic nationality to Governor Fubara.
And as faith teaches that whatever you want to become and believe it and act it, you would become. Gov. Fubara is already moving with the aura and mentality of a General as he traverses the length and breadth of the state commissioning projects and flagging off new ones ahead of the Yuletide.Let the Trumpet of Victory sound.
