Governor Siminalayi Fubara’s political journey took another dramatic turn in Abuja on Sunday after he emerged from the All Progressives Congress screening venue visibly irritated, declined to take questions from waiting journalists and gave only a blunt “No comment” before leaving the Plateau Governor’s Lodge.
Multiple reports said he spent barely 10 to 20 minutes in the room, a stark contrast to the usually choreographed calm that follows the screening of sitting governors and other heavyweight aspirants. The episode has now become the latest public signal that the Rivers power struggle is far from settled.
The screening itself was never going to be routine. Fubara, who defected from the Peoples Democratic Party to the APC in December 2025, entered the ruling party after months of political turbulence in Rivers State and after his camp and that of the Federal Capital Territory Minister, Nyesom Wike, had spent months trading accusations, alliances and counter-alliances.
His appearance before the APC panel was therefore not just an administrative exercise, but a test of whether the party could truly absorb one of the most combustible political figures in the South South without publicly exposing the fractures beneath the surface.
What made Sunday’s drama more intriguing was the APC’s refusal to provide a straight answer on whether Fubara was actually screened in the substantive sense.
APC National Secretary, Ajibola Basiru, would not confirm the governor’s status, instead insisting that the process should not be reduced to a yes or no verdict while the committee was still compiling its findings.
His carefully hedged response was: “I don’t know what you mean by ‘screen’.” He added that the screening committee would sit down and issue a report after seeing everyone it was scheduled to see.
That line, while bureaucratically neat, did little to quiet the growing suspicion that the party was deliberately keeping its cards close to its chest.
APC National Chairman Nentawe Yilwatda tried to lower the temperature a day earlier by arguing that Fubara should not be singled out because other governors had also missed their slots.
“Why single one person out?” he asked, stressing that state executives with pressing official engagements could be accommodated later.
He said governors of Rivers, Kwara and Ebonyi, among others, were being given room to attend to their states and return “anytime they are free” within the screening window.
On paper, that sounded conciliatory. In political reality, it also left room for interpretation, because in Rivers politics, timing is rarely innocent and silence is usually loaded.
The bigger story is the unresolved struggle between Fubara and Wike, which has now migrated from the Government House and the party machine into the APC’s internal selection process.
Vanguard reported that the old peace arrangement between both men is already under strain again, with the Rivers 2027 race reopening old wounds and reviving questions over who truly controls the state’s political structure.
The same report said the battle lines have re-emerged around succession and party loyalty, while the APC screening has become another arena for demonstrating influence, loyalty and control.
That tension is not confined to Fubara alone. Kingsley Chinda, the House of Representatives Minority Leader and one of Wike’s most visible allies, appeared before the APC screening panel on Saturday, a development that immediately fuelled speculation over whether the Rivers political battlefield was being redrawn in real time.
TheCable reported that Chinda, who remains a PDP lawmaker on record, appeared before the APC committee for the Rivers governorship primaries, alongside another Wike-linked aspirant, Dax George-Kelly.
The report also noted that the appearance had intensified talk of a possible switch, even though Chinda had not publicly confirmed any defection.
At the same time, the contest for Rivers is not being fought only at the top. BusinessDay reported that the APC screening committee in Rivers cleared 32 House of Assembly aspirants said to be loyal to Fubara, while other aspirants linked to Wike were also screened.
That detail matters because it shows the battle is being organised across multiple layers of the state’s political architecture, not merely around the governorship slot.
In other words, the fight is about the legislature, the governorship ticket, party machinery and the narrative of who inherited what from whom.
The result is a political theatre in which every gesture now carries meaning. Fubara’s refusal to speak, the APC’s refusal to confirm, Yilwatda’s insistence on flexibility and Basiru’s procedural language all point to the same truth: the party is managing a delicate and potentially explosive Rivers equation.
The governor has already crossed into the APC, but that does not mean the battle over his place in the state’s future is over. On the contrary, Sunday’s optics suggest the opposite. The ruling party may be trying to process him as an aspirant, but Rivers politics is still processing the consequences of his alignment.
For now, the most important fact is not whether Fubara smiled, answered questions or stayed long enough in the room. It is that the APC screening exercise, meant to regularise ambitions ahead of 2027, has instead amplified the suspicion that Rivers remains the country’s most volatile state-level power contest.
The governor walked out without explanation. His party withheld judgment. His rivals remained in motion. And the silence that followed may yet prove louder than any speech he could have given in Abuja.
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