Rivers crisis not engineered by FG, Information Minister clarifies

Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, has said the that federal government has no hand in the political crisis rocking Rivers state.

Idris absolved the government from all blame during his appearance on Channels Television “Sunrise Daily”, which was monitored by The Nation.

He explained that the state’s predicament was not orchestrated by the All Progressives Congress (APC) administration, adding that a few of the participants in the crisis are members of President Bola Tinubu’s cabinet.

He said: “The Rivers issue is a political issue coming out of Rivers state. What has the federal government, for example done? Did it say the people in the state should have crisis among themselves? Is it engineered by the federal government? I’m yet to see that. 

“It is easy to speculate that because some of the actors seem to be people associated with the government at the center. And there is this tendency to think that the federal government is involved in the crisis in Rivers.

“Federal government cannot be involved in the crisis. It’s not only in Rivers state that you have political crisis, a state that has an opposing political party.

According to the minister, even within the same party, the president had stepped in to mediate political issues in other states, such as Ondo.

He stressed that the upheaval in the south-south oil-rich state could not be engineered by the government at the centre, as there is no evidence to prove otherwise.

He added: “In Ondo state, for example, the president has had to intervene, wedge into this kind of crisis, to bring people together, reduce friction and tension that exists between them, and they are members of the same political party.

“The fact that it is happening in Rivers does not mean the federal government is the one orchestrating the political crisis. I’ve not found evidence to say that it is the federal government that is engineering the crisis in Rivers state.”