The Minister for Education, Nyesom Wike is a typical crude politician. His remarks are so utterly without class and panache that the only place he should be legally allowed to practice politics should be in the Amazon jungle with monkeys and Tarzan as the electorate.
Unfortunately in Nigeria he has unlimited powers even reaching up to the ears of the Presidency, but more disheartening is the rhetoric he fills the ears of the people with.
Here is what Wike had to say in reference to Governor Amaechi’s agricultural project whilst speaking to members of Grassroot Development Initiative in Tai Local Government Area of the state.
According to Wike, “there is nothing called new PDP. They have been defeated in court. They have been defeated in INEC. Nobody will challenge Mr. President. For all those intimidations, be rest assured you will get all the necessary protections within the ambits of the Law. Nobody will intimidate you.
“You must know people who mean well for you. You all have to know that the Ogonis are not monkeys. When I hear people say they have something for Ogoni, the only industry they have for you is a banana industry. Holy Ghost fire for all the people, for all those that conspired that there is nothing that is good for the Ogoni people except to make them have bananas. Ogoni people have paid their dues. They are not meant to be eating bananas”.
Having established that the potassium in Bananas is not good enough for the dietary system of the Ogoni people, Wike passed the microphone to a former Senator from the state, Lee Maeba.
Maeba threatened to make bananas extinct in Rivers. He said, “We are not monkeys and we are not growing bananas at all. They have been talking on the radio that they uncovered a plot. There is no need to uncover anything, I said I will lead a well-meaning protest of all the Ogonis and by the time we return there will be no more bananas”, he threatened.
Maeba also alleged that the banana plantation was one of the factors undermining the implementation of the United Nations Environmental Programme, UNEP, report:
“I said it in Bori that after listening to the cries of the Ogonis, they agreed that the soil of Ogoni is contaminated and there must be clean-up and compensation. When the compensation team arrived from New York, Pharo led a group of agriculturist and went to establish banana farm and told them that the soil is good that they should not pay compensation; they should not clean up the land.
“But with those bananas, they are using to deceive our people, to deceive the United Nations, to deceive the Federal Government that the soil is clean. We shall clean up the bananas and clean up the soil”, he added.
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