Chief Medical Director of the University of Port Harcourt Teaching Hospital and a member of Governor Nyesom Wike’s transition Committee, Prof. Henry Ugboma, said the Rivers governor purposely set an agenda to discredit the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi who is his (Wike’s) immediate predecessor.
Ugboma said that tarnishing Amaechi’s image was Wike’s number one agenda even before his inauguration as governor.
Speaking on Arise TV on Monday, 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 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 marshal 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.”
Ugboma said Wike planned to make a public spectacle of Amaechi to deny him the chance of serving in President Buhari’s cabinet.
One of the spectacle, he said, include the judicial panel of inquiry established to indict Amaechi using false, cooked up reports.
“They came up with plans to destroy one after another, 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.
He added, “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 in Rivers State from being on the ballot in 2019.”
But the the state Commissioner for Information and Communications, Paulinus Nsirim, dismissed Ugboma’s statement, saying that Amaechi refused to hand over to Wike.
“This was the same man (Amaechi) that said he would see where Wike would get money to pay salaries.
“The Judicial panel indicted him (Amaechi). He went to High Court, he lost. He went to Appeal Court, he lost. The matter is at the Supreme Court now.
“He (Amaechi) did not hand over. Governor Wike had to start from the scratch. Amaechi left behind three months unpaid salaries, five months pension arrears. So, there is nothing like Wike wanted to (discredit the former governor).
“The man who took over reigns of governance had to look for a way to start governance and he needed to get information through the judicial process because not even one line of paper was given to him. It was the only state in country where there was no hand-over in 2015.”
