Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, has been outed for setting an agenda to discredit his predecessor
and Minister of Transportation, Rt Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, from the onset of Wike’s administration.
Speaking on a TV programme on Monday, a member of Wike’s transition committee, now Chief
Medical Director of the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital (UPTH), Prof Henry Ugboma,
said tarnishing Amaechi’s image was Wike’s number one agenda even before his inauguration into
office as governor of Rivers State.
Ugboma said, “I can rightly tell you that the Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike has this
paranoid issue against the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi. I noticed this as a member of
the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP and that was one of the reasons I left the party. I was a member of the
transition committee set up by Wike immediately after the election to marshall out and put together things that will destroy
the honourable minister of transportation, and Governor Wike immediately set us to task, that we
must derive, contrived things that will mess up Amaechi and destroy him politically, and make sure that he
doesn’t take up any political position in the country. That was the mandate given to the transition committee.
“Directors, Permanent Secretaries and people in MDAs of the State were invited, some of them
threatened, some of them encouraged that they will be given positions if they come up with issues
that will give them the report that they will give to the Judicial Panel of Inquiry that the incoming
governor, Wike will set up to immediately indict Amaechi. We immediately went to task. But when I
saw what was happening, the reports they were issuing out, lies, immediately at the floor there, we were asked to start with the RSSDA (Rivers State Sustainable Development Agency) a scholarship
unit that was set up by Amaechi, that sent a lot of our children from Rivers State to overseas for
higher education. They were immediately written to, to come back and continue their academics in
the country or forget about their education. Some of them have gone into depression overseas
because they couldn’t continue, and staff of RSSDA were not paid salaries for months and years, till
date, I don’t even know if that department still exists. This was what Wike started with as he came
in.
Ugboma detailed how Wike planned to make a public spectacle of Amaechi to deny him the chance
of serving in President Muhammadu Buhari’s cabinet, including the Judicial panel of inquiry setup to indict him
(Amaechi) using false, cooked up reports.
“They came up with plans to destroy one after the other, all the laudable projects that Amaechi did,
all were setup, accusing him that he stole so much money from even the institutions that he
dealt with, but all were lies. And they brought out a young man, one Wechie Livingstone, who came and said he
had declared for the party (PDP) then. The young man later apologised to Amaechi that he was forced to say all that he said, that when he went to the National Assembly to tell them that Amaechi stole this
and stole that, that it was Wike that sent them to do that. He apologised to the minister that all the
things he said were lies and deceit. So all those things were programmed and planned by Wike just to falsely indict Amaechi.
“A panel of inquiry was set up and the reports that we brought out from the transition committee was sent to the Justice Omereji panel. Remember, this Omereji later turned out to be the
man who stopped the All Progressives Congress, APC in Rivers State from being on the ballot in
2019. Today he has been compensated with being the chairman of the Rivers State Independent
Electoral Commission, RSIEC. The same thing happened then, Amaechi went to court to stop that
panel from sitting. I can assure you now that the judge who sat on that matter and rejected Amaechi’s
request to stop the panel, this same man that has today been named as the next Chief Judge of Rivers
State, Justice Amadi. He has two other Judges who are his seniors, but he was considered ahead of
them.
On his part, Sen Andrew Uchendu wondered why Wike had made it his primary
responsibility to continuously attempt to tarnish Amaechi’s image instead of building on, and
sustaining the laudable projects Amaechi put up for the state.
“I think the main agenda of the present administration in Rivers state is to destroy Rt Hon. Chibuike
Rotimi Amaechi and I just don’t know why. It is most unfair. The Government of Amaechi started developmental projects; you do not wait
until there is a problem before you embark on developmental projects. There must be some
programmes that are proactive. So many states today are facing traffic jams and this was the
problem that led to the conception of the idea of the monorail, and the project was properly
conceived, awarded and implementation continued, and if there were any issues that Rivers State
government had with the project, they should conduct an investigation and then conclude on taking
due process, going to court and so on, but that is not the case. They sit down in Government House
only to criticize a project that is supposed to impact positively on the lives of the people. This is most
unfair, and it is the aspect of the administration that we have found deceitful and separationist.
“Now he (Wike) says he is building flyovers, and people are complaining that it is too much, and he
says if people are complaining of 7 flyovers, then he will add 3 more. From which budget are you
doing that? Are you staying in your house, producing the document, or you just sit down and churn
out one? But Amaechi’s own was properly articulated and documented and the Rivers State House
of Assembly passed the budget. As we speak, I have never sighted one document that says this is the
Rivers State Government budget that contains all that, that any responsible government will
organise. But you see somebody sit down, when he thinks of one project or the other, he coughs it
out and it is implemented.”
