Ignore his early working life as a staff member of former Rivers State governor Peter Odili’s Pamo Clinics and Hospitals, or as a special assistant to the same Dr Odili when the latter took to politics in the early 1990s, or as Rivers State secretary of the Democratic Party of Nigeria in 1996 under the discredited Gen. Sani Abacha transition programme. As a young man trying to find his feet, Rotimi Amaechi, a former Rivers State governor and later Transportation minister under the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, can be forgiven for not being choosy or principled. Since he was elected into the Rivers House of Assembly in 1999 and led the legislature as speaker for eight years, he has imbibed a sense of entitlement that has only grown and ossified over the years.
Nearly all his adult life, Mr Amaechi has been on the public payroll, and has had the good fortune to live in luxury, despite his pretences and lies. To become disconnected from that trough, as he claims government policies have forced him, is to consign him to a fate too tasking for his delicate mind to handle. He has, therefore, developed coping mechanism integral to his personality, but hidden from public view or the private eyes of those who helped him along in life. That mechanism involves deploying cynicism, freneticism, hysteria, immoderation, and his unfounded superior airs. He was in his 30s when he entered public life. About 60 years old now, he feels so traumatised that circumstances impel him to develop a new way of life outside public glare. Until he reenters public office, he will in the interim conspire to incite the public to a revolution by shaming them out of what he described as their docility.
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Last week, at various forums, including the inauguration of their 2027 presidential programme planned to be executed through the African Democratic Congress (ADC) party, he was all over the media spreading hate speech and ladling out inciting remarks to achieve certain political goals. He tried to justify why the political coalition he supported veered away from founding a new party to instead adopting the generally disused ADC long accustomed to pimping its way through Nigeria’s political minefields, seducing every political straggler. Last week, he pontificated on television why his coalition preferred an old party to a new one. According to him, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was conspiring not to register any new party, with particular animosity to the All Democratic Alliance (ADA) which the coalition had wanted to float. He said nothing about the fact that the coalition had not even applied yet, having only delivered a letter of intent, let alone be denied.
He was not satisfied denouncing INEC alone, he also lashed out, with no substantiation, that the federal government and INEC planned to rig the 2027 elections. It was not the first time he made that frantic allegation; nor will it be the last time. He had warned that the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) could not win a free and fair election, adding that the people must rise up this time to force their way. It is an invitation to chaos, but the security agencies have obviously felt he has not transgressed his constitutional rights. What is incontrovertible is that given his antecedents, especially his lack of moderation and total unconcern for the health of the republic, Mr Amaechi will continue to make incendiary comments about politics, governance, and elections. As governor, he was himself not a model democrat, nor a brilliant policy man, but he sees specks in other people’s eyes than the beams in his own.
The former Rivers governor has never been able to weigh his words. He speaks grandiosely, excessively and imperiously. In an interview with newsmen after the unveiling of ADC as the 2027 coalition vehicle, he was particularly hyperbolic. “Nigeria is destroyed,” he fulminated. “People can’t eat. People can’t buy food. There’s no money to buy food. Everything is gone. Inflation is at its peak. And the federal government is busy going around trying to hijack the election. INEC is helping them to hijack the election.” Then, on Thursday, at an event in Abuja, he again whined: “The only way you can stop Tinubu from being the president of Nigeria in 2027 is to run an election of Nigerians versus the bandits. If you think you will just sit down and do that, may God be with you. The elites who are stealing Nigerian money are not up to 100,000, but you have 200 million Nigerians who can fight 100,000 men. You sit down in your house and complain and grumble. What makes you think the elites would move their hands completely? Who told you the elites don’t know how you are feeling? They know you are not happy. But you are helpless not because the elites made you helpless; you made yourself helpless.”
Mr Amaechi rose from obscurity to prominence without the intervening catalyst of leadership training and rhetorical composure. Since he lost the APC presidential primary in 2022, he has grown nasty and acerbic. He does not think anyone matches him in any way, despite his appalling lack of depth and sagacity, not even his former boss, President Muhammadu Buhari whom he once excoriated in unflattering language. It is one thing to be so full of himself, but why also scheme, by excessively foul language, to plunge the country into chaos simply because he thinks he has been denied his due? Yet, rummaging through his years in public service, it is hard to find a few extraordinary achievements to recommend his boasting or validate his grandiosity and pomposity. Years of exaggerating his capacity, not to talk of years of unprincipled and unrestrained politics during which he casually passes judgement on his peers and betters, have conspired to blunt his little appeal and also sentence him to the periphery of Nigerian politics. It is hard to situate him elsewhere.
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