Whatever happened at the Plateau State Governors’ Lodge in Abuja on Sunday, it was not what anyone expected — and no one involved is in a hurry to explain it.
Siminalayi Fubara, the Rivers State governor, arrived at the APC screening venue at around 3:15 p.m. and left shortly afterward. Those who watched him go described a man who did not look like someone who had just completed a routine party exercise. The word that kept coming up was frustration — visible, unmasked frustration — and it set off an immediate wave of speculation about what had transpired between the governor and the screening committee before he walked out.
Whether Fubara actually completed the screening before leaving remains officially unanswered. Ajibola Basiru, who serves as secretary of the screening committee, gave journalists very little to work with. Asked directly whether the governor had been properly screened, Basiru responded: “I don’t know what you mean by screening. Anybody that appears before the screening committee, of course, is part of the process.” He added that the committee had not yet concluded its work or produced any formal report, making it impossible — or at least inconvenient — to say definitively what had or had not been accomplished.
It is the kind of non-answer that tends to confirm that something worth explaining did happen.
The timing matters. Fubara’s political positioning within the APC has been anything but straightforward, and the tensions shaping Rivers State politics have been simmering for long enough that an incident like this does not occur in a vacuum. Whether Sunday’s walkout — if that is what it was — signals a deeper fracture, a tactical manoeuvre, or simply a bad afternoon remains to be seen.
Fubara’s camp had not responded to requests for comment by the time this report was filed. That silence, in its own way, is part of the story.
