Okenyi Kenechi
The Minister of Transportation, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi has been in politics for over 30 years. He looks like a courageous politician too with his numerous fights with the then President Goodluck Jonathan that led to the former governor and some of his then colleagues decamping to the APC, thereby depleting the ranks of the then ruling party, PDP.
It is a no contest that the victory enjoyed by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 will be largely attributed to that move by the minister and other of his colleagues. He gloated in the euphoria and was a darling within the ranks of the All Progressives Congress.
However, Jonathan losing the presidential election cemented Nyesom Wike’s victory in 2015 as no General can survive a war on two fronts. The people rose in anger of that loss to vote overwhelmingly for Wike and he has enjoyed a reasonable level of goodwill in the state ever since.
Politically, Wike and Amaechi are threats to each other and they know it. That is why they counter each other on every policy taken or about to be taken.
The Minister would have been an object for political study had he pulled the political stunts of working to install President Buhari in 2015 and also installing his political protégé and current Director General of NIMASA, Dakuku Adol Peterside.
Amaechi won at the federal and lost the home front and no other person that the minister knows that home is where the flavour is. As they say, politics is local. If he had also succeeded, the PDP would have been dead and buried.
The greatest luck that the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, had as they lost the presidential election, was a Nyesom Wike victory as governor of Rivers State. That is the singular lifeline that is sustaining the opposition party, otherwise, Nigeria would have been a one-party state.
Rivers State is the capital of Nigeria’s politics as of today and the Rivers model can work anywhere in the the country.
In 2015, shortly after the the elections, I wrote that ‘with the victory of Governor Nyesom Wike, even President Buhari is not safe.’
Many people attributed that warning to possible reactivation of violence in the state and missed the point. The insistence by governor Wike that President Buhari should not visit Rivers State are all attributes to that safety. Wike does not care.
I made that submission due to the fact that the then newly elected governor, left nothing unturned while dismantling the remaining Amaechi structure in the state. Cars were retrieved from civil servants who served under Amaechi’s tenure while those who resisted were dealt with. He depleted the structure that by the time he was done, the APC had to rely on the court to reclaim two Senatorial seats.
His latest assault on the minister is that the minister has not attracted any federal project to Rivers State and only the minister can rightly reply that assault.
The APC in Rivers State has not been able to galvanize its members so as to have a solid structure with a watertight strategy that will allow them put up a fight in the state come 2019. The party seems divided with members pledging allegiances between Amaechi, who is the leader of the party in the state and Senator Magnus Abe, currently representing Rivers South-East at the National Assembly.
The Minister had in the past, said that he would not support Magnus Abe in his quest to unseat governor Wike, and with the finger pointing and accusations between the two camps, the minister might succeed in pushing Abe and his loyalists out of the party and that spells doom for the APC.
The Opobo show as a pointer
On Friday, 6th of April, the Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi faction of the All Progressives Congress, led their members to Opobo, the hometown of Dakuku Peterside for a rally. It was tagged ‘operation show your PVC’.
However, the APC met a little fraction of opinion shapers and leaders of the town as they had been invited to the government house in Portharcourt.
Remember, Opobo is the town where the Director General of NIMASA and the potential APC gubernatorial candidate for the coming election comes from.
The bewildered minister, had to coronate Dr. Chidi Lyod, a former state house of assembly member from Ikwerre ethnic nationality, a king. How would Dakuku win in 2019 if his kit and kin have no support for their son?
That action is a long-shot away from the 18-yard box and tells the minister all that he needs to know. The APC would die a natural dirt at the altar of Nyesom Wike’s politics if the party does not galvanize its members under one roof.
