When President Tinubu called the elders of Rivers State for a meeting on 11th March, 2025 and charged them to go back to the state and work to restore peace, he stealthily pulled the rug from under their feet with his declaration of the state of emergency barely a week after, leaving them with no time to carry out his mandate. This subterfuge indicated a mad rush to get something untoward done amidst all odds, as the days unfolded.
Little wonder that Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ibas (rtd), the Sole Administrator appointed, unlike a placeholder, is in a hurry too, to systematically undo every and any semblance of democratic structure in the administrative arrangement in the State. Starting from the mundane and the ordinary, Ibas removed the photographs of the elected governor Sim Fubara from all offices when the governor had not yet been removed from office but only on suspension.
This was a red alert on a possibly anti-democratic mindset the sole administrator was coming in with, probably engineered by his paymasters, advertently. The next was the overly audacious dissolution of the board of existing statutory institutions such as the State Independent Electoral Commission, Councils of Traditional Rulers and governing Councils of tertiary institutions, etc.