The outgoing Governor of Bayelsa State, Mr Seriake Dickson, has accused his Rivers State counterpart, Mr Nyesom Wike, of executing “a clandestine ethnic supremacist agenda” to undermine the interest of Ijaw people in the politics of Rivers State.
He said part of Wike’s political plot was to fan the embers of hatred between the Ijaw people in Rivers and their kith and kin in Bayelsa State with a view to stoking the fire of disharmony in Ijaw land.
Dickson, who stated this during a live media chat in Yenagoa on Saturday night, criticised Wike for using the disputed Soku oil wells between the two states as a mere subterfuge to achieve his interest.
Dickson noted that the Rivers governor was playing up the Soku oil wells dispute as a ploy to create disunity among the Ijaw ethnic nationality and also cover-up“the deliberate underdevelopment of Rivers Ijaw communities” by pretending to be their champion.
Dickson was responding to recent reports credited to Wike in which the Rivers governor accused the Bayelsa governor of sneaking into Rivers State and paying a visit to the monarch of Kalabari Kingdom without recourse to protocol.
Wike, according to reports, had accused Dickson of creating tension in Rivers State by embarking on the trip without seeking “clearance from appropriate authorities” under the guise of “coming to see Ijaw people.”
He said Dickson was pretentiously “professing love for Ijaw people in Rivers but yet busy working to take the state’s oil resources in Soku and Kula.”
Wike cautioned that but for self-restraint, he would have dethroned the Amanyanabo (monarch) of Kalabari Kingdom, Theophilus Princewill, because of Dickson’s visit to his palace.
But Dickson described Wike’s comments as “reckless, childish and uncivilised,” stressing that the Rivers governor should have known that the dispute over the Soku oil wells predated his (Wike’s) administration.
Dickson, who dismissed Wike’s claim that Bayelsa State was laying ownership claim to Soku, explained that while Soku was a Kalabari-Ijaw community in Rivers State, the disputed oil wells were located in Oluasiri in the Nembe Local Government of Bayelsa State.
Dickson said, “And I want it recorded that Governor Wike is deliberately inciting disunity in Ijaw land because of his ethnic supremacist political agenda which he knows that Bayelsa, particularly Governor Dickson and my agenda, will not support. That’s what he’s doing.”
