Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State explains his fractious relationship with President Goodluck Jonathan to TheNEWS editors



In the last few months you have been under heavy artillery fire from Abuja and the party structure was also taken off you. Where does this leave you politically?

Nowhere. It was the judgment of a court. Whether right or wrong, only the Court of Appeal can say. With the little knowledge of the law that I have, you cannot take a matter affecting Rivers State to an Abuja high court. When we got to the High Court, we said it should decline jurisdiction because it doesn’t have it. But we were surprised when it assumed jurisdiction and the judge gave a similar judgment to one he had given for which the Supreme Court did warn him. If you read the judgement of Tafida versus Turaki, the Supreme Court admonished him. That judgement is similar to our own. The Supreme Court said he (the judge) cannot re-write the law and that no court has jurisdiction, both location and legal, on matters of that nature. What he should have done was send it back to Port Harcourt, where the case should have been heard. But the judge must have his reasons for doing that and only the Court of Appeal can say otherwise. In terms of political future, the PDP is not the only party in the country. There’s Accord Party, there’s African Renaissance Party, there’s the PRP and the UPN as well. You can always join any party of your choice. So, there’s nothing to worry about.

Does it mean that the meetings between the President and the G-7 governors have not yielded any fruit?

I don’t know. We have not settled. The way the PDP has been handling the matter with the office of the President or the President himself makes it look like we don’t have a choice; that you either take PDP or forget it. That means even when they chase us from the PDP, we cannot go anywhere else except to resign from politics. But there are so many choices available now; they can’t afford to be behaving that way. If they are behaving this way, you can imagine what will happen during the general elections.

Some people are expecting that during your helicopter ride with the President on Thursday, you must have had a one-on-one talk…

No, no, no.

So what did you discuss?

Nothing. It was a 10 or 15-minute flight from the airport to Okrika and I am the governor of the state. What usually happens is that by protocol, I would accompany him wherever he is going within the state. I accompanied him to Okrika and my colleague, the governor of Bayelsa State, was also in the helicopter as well as his son and his personal security team.

Your participation in the burial activities of the foster mother of Mrs. Patience Jonathan has suggested to some people that there is a bit let-up in the friction between the two of you. Is that the case?

I won’t go there. You know the President like I do. I’m not the aggressor here. I’m the victim. If you look at the crisis, you would know that the state is suffering, I am suffering. The wife of the President changed the Commissioner of Police by calling the Inspector-General and he was changed. She brought somebody that would do her bidding and that of her supporters and, I guess, the President’s supporters, too.

How did all these problems start?

I would attribute it to three things. The first was the attempt by the wife of the President to control the Rivers State government. I remember when female senators came to me after she met with them. She said to them: ‘I’m the highest ranking officer from Rivers State and I wonder why the governor of Rivers State does not accord me that respect.’ I said in law, I don’t see the office of the wife of the President being superior to that of the governor. So, there is that crisis where she wants to control the office of the governor and the government of Rivers State. The resistance is what you are seeing. That crisis took us to the point where she visited Rivers State and in order not to continue the crisis and be a good boy, I accompanied her on the tour of her community in order to show her what we had done in the community–the ring road, primary schools and the health centres we had built. At one of the primary schools, I said: ‘You can see that there are inhabitants around the primary school. What we are going to do is buy the houses around the school, demolish them and create a playing field like we have in Port Harcourt and other areas, so that we don’t have paedophiles assaulting the kids.’ I had hardly finished when she just took the microphone from me and started screaming that in her place, you don’t talk about demolition; you can’t buy any land, the land is of utmost importance to them and all that. So when she finished, I quietly walked to the bus, sat there, knowing at that point, my responsibility was over because I actually wasn’t supposed to accompany her on such a tour.

I had hardly finished when she just took the microphone from me and started screaming that in her place, you don’t talk about demolition; you can’t buy any land, the land is of utmost importance to them and all that. So when she finished, I quietly walked to the bus, sat there, knowing at that point, my responsibility was over because I actually wasn’t supposed to accompany her on such a tour.

Second is the fact that even on that tour, I didn’t know that she had privately organised a reception for herself without even telling me as the sitting governor. When we got to the venue, I quietly walked to a primary school and sat down there. When my wife came and wanted to sit down, I said: ‘No, you go. You are my wife and your job is to receive the wife of the President.’ I sat back. That’s where she was claiming that I beat up my wife. I wonder where I did that. I have never in life slapped a woman and will never slap a woman because I respect womanhood and women. I sent my wife back to go and sit with her because it was not my responsibility. And I was at the primary school when they completed the reception and then we went back to Port Harcourt. Then, she left for Abuja.

Then we got into this crisis of 2011, when the President wanted to run and I said I needed to see a lot of things. I needed to be assured that we wouldn’t have a multiplicity of presidents where we would have too many voices giving directives to so many people. So you have a situation where you have Oduah (Stella) as a president, seizing the aircraft of my state illegally. And when I called the President, he said: ‘I don’t even know. Nobody told me. OK. I would get back to you; let me find out what happened.” Till today, the President is yet to get back to me on the aircraft. You have the wife manipulating power, the Chief of Staff manipulating power, everybody doing one thing or the other. I wanted to make sure that I and the Rivers people are protected. I wasn’t convinced. But after some time, I had meetings with the President and we agreed to work together. Rivers State delivered 2.1 million votes.

Now, within that period, the President had called me and the wife and we sat together and made peace. There again, they promised that nobody would hurt me; nobody will do this and that. That is why this is a bit difficult, because there is nothing new they can tell me that they did not tell me in 2011 and they did not keep to that promise. I was in a meeting, it was just me, the President and his wife and all sorts of promises were made. They promised to protect me. We had hardly won the 2011 elections when the wife descended on me and the Rivers State government. Basically, the only way you can survive is if you then wake up in the morning to say, ‘Good morning, ma. My name is Rotimi Amaechi, governor of Rivers State. Do I greet this person or that person’ If she says no, then I don’t greet you. But if you need to run the office of the governor the way it is supposed to be run, then you would certainly have a disagreement with the wife of the President. It is about power and control. She appears to be somebody who loves power.

How about your role at the Governors’ Forum?

I also told him that I thought I was the youngest governor in Nigeria and therefore can’t be manipulating the 35 other governors, who are members of the forum. There’s nothing he said I said that was not part of what the governors asked me to say. In fact, that’s how the six other governors in PDP and the 11 governors in the APC voted along with me, because their argument is simple: ‘Is there anything the President is accusing Governor Amaechi of that we did not ask him to say?’ I read communiqués and I say what the governors want me to say at meetings and in public. And then, the President now holds it against me and then gets other governors to work for him.

Basically, when the President tried to manage the Governors’ Forum and it was not possible, I think they advised him to either annihilate or dismember the forum. So they went for it. The day we were to hold the Governors’ Forum election, you know we tried it three times. When they saw they were going to lose, they tried to disrupt it. The last time, they couldn’t because we didn’t give them the chance to call the President or his wife. Akpabio was in the habit of stepping out to call the wife of the President or call on the President and they would say: ‘Don’t allow the voting to take place. Disrupt the voting.’ This time, there was no chance for anybody to call because we disabled telephone conversations in that area. When I say we, we made sure, as a people, that if you were coming with your phone, you would not be allowed to use it in the compound.

So the President was aware?

They were in contact. In fact, we had hardly finished the election when they called the President and told him I had been defeated.

How about the ceding of oil wells?

Yes, it is part of the problem. They took about 41 oil wells from us to Abia and took the whole of Soku to Bayelsa and as governor of Rivers State, I have the responsibility to protect the Rivers wells and the Rivers people. So the whole Soku oil wells in the Kalabari area and the 41 oil wells were given to our neighbours and we didn’t have a choice but to respond.

”I was in a meeting, it was just me, the President and his wife and all sorts of promises were made. They promised to protect me. We had hardly won the 2011 elections when the wife descended on me and the Rivers State government. Basically, the only way you can survive is if you then wake up in the morning to say, ‘Good morning, ma. My name is Rotimi Amaechi, governor of Rivers State. Do I greet this person or that person’ If she says no, then I don’t greet you. But if you need to run the office of the governor the way it is supposed to be run, then you would certainly have a disagreement with the wife of the President. It is about power and control. She appears to be somebody who loves power.”

So it is not about me. The G-7 governors are not fighting for their own interests. It is about Nigeria. We are asking about the issues of corruption, we are asking about the issues of mismanagement of Nigerian resources. Why should Nigeria be as poor as we are? In 1970 when I was barely six years old, poverty index in Nigeria was 30 per cent. The other day I said in a meeting that the poverty index was 70 per cent and the Minister of Finance said no, it is 68 per cent. I asked what is the difference between 68 per cent and 70. I tell people every time that I act like a prophet in the country. You know when they introduced the amnesty programme for militants, I opposed it and said: ‘Deal with criminals, punish criminals and don’t give them amnesty.’ They insisted that they would give them amnesty and I said if they were given, other communities would demand for it. What you call amnesty is another way of distributing wealth among some criminals. And today, a part of the proposed resolution of the Boko Haram problem is amnesty. So when they finish, the MASSOB will demand amnesty and OPC will also demand amnesty.

The same way, months ago, I said the country is broke even though we are careful not to use the word ‘broke’. The Governors’ Forum said the country was broke and that if the Minister of Finance cannot manage the economy she should resign. Oh! She said: ‘I dey kampe; the economy is working.’ But a few days ago they came out to say the country is cash-strapped. I asked an economist what it means and he said it means the the country can’t fund its expenditure. So, if you can’t fund your expenditure, what does it mean? We are broke. It is difficult to pay salaries now. I have never paid salaries on the 30th before. This is the first month I am paying salaries on the 30th.

My colleague, the governor of Benue State, told me that teachers are on strike in his state because of salary. And you would see more in the next few months. The country is broke. The amount of money being stolen is enough to run the economy. They set aside 455,000 barrels per day for local refining. We don’t refine in Nigeria. Crude is refined overseas, brought back to Nigeria and then we pay subsidy on it.


to be continue on www.chrisbassey..com

oh well its so unfortunate to know that our president can not keep promises that is why people like ASUU can not believe him again and is very bad. Ok oooo

Please join another party or be an activist.