“No matter how long a log stays in the water, it doesn’t become a crocodile,” a Bambara proverb from Mali.
The above epigraph speaks to what can at best be described as questionable the leadership credentials of Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, despite his many years at the apex of the political leadership of the Nigerian nation.
Without a doubt, Mr. Amaechi now qualifies to be among the new generation of the country’s leadership league that began in this political dispensation in 1999 till date. For starters, he was the Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly for eight years (1999-2007).
Despite the monkey wrench thrown at his primary electoral victory by former President Olusegun Obasanjo that truncated his participation in the consequent governorship election of his state, his primary electoral ticket having been gifted his cousin, Sir Celestine Omeiha by the same Obasanjo, Mr. Amaechi fought to the Supreme Court from where his palm kernel was cracked for him, thus making him the executive governor of Rivers State for two terms of eight years in total. The man from the Ikwere extraction even became Primus Interpere among his colleagues as they made him the Chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF).
Mr. Amaechi’s political career didn’t end with his attainment of the highest political office in Rivers State as a governor. His governorship tenure has not effectively ended when he readied himself to paint his own image on the nation’s central political canvas. First, he was made the Director General of the then Presidential candidate Mohammadu Buhari of the APC. Second, he was made the Minister of Transportation for the uninspiring eight-year duration of the gaunt General from Daura.
Mr. Amaechi may be currently temporarily retired from partisan politics but is hardly tired, having lost out in the 2022 APC presidential primary contest in which now President Bola Ahmed Tinubu was the victor.
Mr. Amaechi’s greatest problem—-like many of his compatriots who found themselves in the different layers of the power corridor—-is not because of any inherent or studiously acquired leadership credentials but because he’s simply lucky that he has a Chi that always cracks his kernel whether or not he deserved it. His real problem is the wrong interpretation, if not delusion about what quality leadership entails.
Even when it was glaring that he simply lacked the presence of mind to know a leader when he sees one and his exaggerated sense of self-importance, Mr. Amaechi believes, erroneously, that he’s imbued with the leadership qualities that a nation like Nigeria needs to attain its developmental objectives either because of what he did in the past or said (both past and present) as exemplified by his jaded, inchoate, unexampled and uninspiring accomplishments either as a state governor or a federal Minister or his utterances on issues of national importance.
Mr. Amaechi is fast becoming a veteran not only in subterfuge but also glibness in the way he cavalierly, and in a simpletonian manner, drops words with appalling gullibility unexpected of someone of his status and political pedigree such as when, as a governor, during an interview, he said he hates money, perhaps, to mischievously ingratiate himself with the gullible hoi polloi in the polity.
The other time was when, in an attempt to prove to the electorate that he was ready to lead in the runup to the 2022 presidential primary Mr. Amaechi jogged around the Port Harcourt stadium in an apparent but misguided mockery of Tinubu’s alleged frailty then, his co-contestant. But Tinubu responded with an upper-cut answer that the job description of a president doesn’t include a boxing match or the lifting of cement blocks or something along that line.
At a recent conference tagged “Strengthening Democracy in Nigeria,” Mr. Amaechi took his glibness and juvenile interrogation of issues of national importance—-which are beginning to be his trademark—-to a ridiculously dizzying height when it was his turn to lend his views to the topic.
Hear him, “None of you here seated can defend the votes. If you have complained… Nigerians have been clapping for you. The only way Ibrahim Shekarau became governor was because people lined up.”
” It happened in Ghana before the election of the last president. Two days, a lot of us were called to intervene. But why did they do that? The people were ready to die. You are talking and abusing everybody. Nobody has power and will give it to you, not even me. If you want a pastor as president, go and get one.”
“The politician is there in Nigeria to steal, maim, and kill to remain in power. If you think Tinubu will give it to you, you are wasting your time.”
While there’s no contention that Mr. Amaechi made an incendiary statement that should necessarily attract his interrogation by the country’s security establishments, the statement, talk not of its incoherence, speaks to his pedestrian mindset and juvenile predisposition. He had hardly made any statement that could be interpreted as trying to find a lasting solution to the myriad of the country’s problems or enabling or commensurate to his previous political antecedents since his loss to Tinubu in 2022.
Perhaps more importantly, Mr. Amaechi, as his previous glib talks already suggested, lacks the presence of mind to recognize the fact that he has inadvertently indicted himself when he said at the event that “the politician is there in Nigeria to steal, maim, and kill to remain in power.” As a veteran politician who has straddled different levers of power, deductive reasoning can be made from the statement that the probability was higher that Mr. Amaechi may have stolen, maimed, and even killed to remain not only as a House Speaker for eight years but as governor to boot for the same period not to talk of being a federal Minister. A self-indictment cannot get any dire than that.
Mr. Amaechi’s thoughtless jab in which he said if anyone thinks that Tinubu will willingly relinquish power is tantamount to “Waiting for Godot” flies in the face of an electoral contest in which Tinubu scored the highest votes and met other constitutional electoral requirements that today made him the president that he now wants Nigerians to die for. It doesn’t get any more irresponsible than that.
While it’s not unexpected that Mr. Amaechi will perhaps be among the last rumps of the “Mohicans” to give the deserved credit to President Tinubu based on his incontrovertible democracy credentials and its sustainability, the president’s usual refrain that “power is not served a-la-carte” cannot, and should not be equated with extrajudicial means to acquire power. President Bola Tinubu, since becoming a politician, has always deployed legal and constitutional means to redress any infringement on his person or his leadership (and won most of the time), even when others used outright political brigandage and patently unconstitutional means to ride roughshod on those legitimate rights. He never asked the Nigerian people to rise and die if need be because of his quest for power.
Mr. Amaechi’s recent criminal statement, which he had suggested in the past, attests to his inconsequential national electoral value, not to talk of his vain and empty leadership qualities; hence, his suggested resort to power acquisition through violent and unconstitutional means should be roundly condemned.
Methinks it’s high time Mr. Amaechi and other politicians in his ilk who equate their longevity in the corridors of power without the corresponding leadership skills should be permanently retired from politics to allow those who are imbued with the requisite leadership credentials to mount the stage. Representative democracy is a game of numbers. If Mr. Amaechi truly believes he has what it takes to lead the country—-which is now glaringly in doubt—-he should be articulating thought-provoking views and ideas and not expounding some asinine and provocative statements that truly border on idiocy.
*Femi Odere lives in Abuja. He can be reached at [email protected].
