‘You need to reconcile Fubara, Wike to maintain peace in Rivers’, Shehu Sani tells Tinubu

To maintain peace in Rivers State, President Bola Tinubu has been advised to ensure reconciliation between Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State and the Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Nyesom Wike.

The call for peace was made on Wednesday, March 19, by Shehu Sani, a former lawmaker who represented Kaduna Central in the Eighth Senate.

Speaking on Arise Television’s Morning Show, Sani said that most political crises require political solutions and that the incident in Rivers State requires a tactical display of wisdom by the president.

Sani said, “A political conflict needs a political solution and whatever happens in Rivers State today, you cannot remove the key and the instrumental factors of Wike.

“And you cannot have peace without Wike and without Fubara. So both of them are needed within this window of six months to appease if the issue is before the Federal Executive Council,” he noted.

The former lawmaker stated that the most important thing in the ongoing turn out of events in the state is for peace to return to Rivers State.

He said, “It is for the president to use his wisdom, to use the levers of his leadership to see that he returns the state back to peace whether the Wike is there or not.

“The most important thing is that we all want peace in Rivers State,” he added.

Sani’s advise to the president comes hours after Tinubu declared a State of Emergency in Rivers and suspended Governor Fubara alongside all the lawmakers serving in the House of Assembly.

The decision by the president has been met with outrage from Nigerians, various leaders and organisations including the former vice president, Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and the Nigerian Bar Association among others.

Many have described the decision of the president to remove a duly elected governor of a state under an emergency rule as illegal and unconstitutional.