Embattled Rivers State Governor, Rotimi Amaechi, yesterday took a swipe on Dame Patience Jonathan when he said the first lady lied against him in her public account of the rift that ensued between them recently.
The Governor who also doubles as Chairman of the crisis-ridden Nigerian Governors’ Forum, NGF, stated this in Port Harcourt, the state capital, when clergymen of the Niger Delta Bishops Forum paid him a courtesy call at the Government House, Port Harcourt.
The clerics were in the state capital to mediate in the political crisis in the state.
The bishops had, some weeks ago, visited the First Lady and the Minister of State for Education, Mr. Nyesom Wike, in Abuja as part of their efforts to resolve the lingering misunderstanding between the President’s wife and the Governor.
According to him, time has come for the general public to know what happened between him and the first lady a few weeks back.
“I want to be put on record that the wife of the President said when my wife came to beg me, I pushed her away. I have never quarrelled with my wife publicly and I will never quarrel with my wife publicly,” he said.
“There was no time I pushed my wife away and there will be no time I will push my wife away. I just want to correct that so that nobody goes away with the impression that somebody told my wife, ‘go and talk to your husband, she came and I pushed her away’.
“No, that day, I simply walked away into a bus and I sat down until they finished. So, all I did was to go back to the bus to enable my wife perform her official function of someone who had received the wife of the President and escort her to all the places she wanted to go to.”
According to him, he had enormous respect for both President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife and would continue to respect them and their offices.
He said, “I hope that it (mediation) will work. Niger Delta monarchs came and no result came out of it and since you are men of God, I hope that this one, God will bless it. I hope so because that is the same way I spoke to them (the monarchs) and they said, ‘watch out, it will work,’ and they never returned because it never worked.
“There are so many persons who had come to mediate, but nothing came out of it. If it is peace that everybody wants, I am ready for peace. When you say you are seeking for permission, I am wondering why, because if you did not have the permission, you would not have gone to see the wife of the President.
“The mere fact that you have seen the wife of the President means that you have initiated the peace move. So, you don’t require any further approval than the approval of God that you have started with.”
While attesting to the fact that, Mrs. Jonathan was his ‘mother’, the Governor, insisted that no mother would take away a state Police Commissioner to the detriment of her son.
He continued, “As the Governor, by protocol, I will receive the President and you know that the President is not just our President, he is the Head of the nation. But when the wife of the President came, I went to receive her at the airport and she slept in Port Harcourt.
“The next day, she came up with a programme that was not part of the official programme and what was the programme? She wanted her people to receive her in Okrika. There was no plan; there was no protocol arrangement, nothing.
“We just had to quickly arrange protocol to take her to the place. But to do that, we wanted to also show her, as part of her own programme, not our programme, the projects we had done in Okrika.
“So, we took her to the Rufus Ada-George Ring Road in Okrika, which we started and completed and then somewhere, we saw a health centre and a primary school and I said stop, let me show her this health centre.
“We looked at the health centre and we were satisfied. At the primary school, there were houses around, too close for comfort; no football field, no playground, no space at all around the school and I turned to the wife of the President and said, ‘Your Excellency ma, we have not finished with this building, we would buy the houses that are surrounding the primary school and demolish them’.
“Once she heard the word ‘demolish,’ the wife of the President flared up and took the microphone from me and started all sorts of diatribes that I won’t mention here for the respect I have for the office of the wife of the President.
“When she finished, I felt that it was wrong to confront the wife of the President publicly. When she finished, I withdrew and walked into the bus. When we got to the ground of the reception, which was not part of our programme, which she just included by herself, I came down from the bus and went to sit in one of the primary schools.
“If you build a primary school and the place is surrounded by people who are cooking and selling and buying, that is not a conducive atmosphere for learning and we did not say we would come there with caterpillars and demolish; we said we would buy the houses from the people and pay them off to be able to get a football field and provide playground for the children and fence off the school so that we can protect them from paedophiles. That was what happened.”
On the issue of Nyesom Wike, the Minister of State for Education, whom he nominated for ministerial appointment, Amaechi said, “I hear you also visited Nyesom Wike. I try not to talk about Wike. I say so because he is my subordinate; I try not to talk about him but I hear you visited him. Why I won’t talk about him is that Nyesom Wike, his second tenure as Obio Akpor council chairman was by the grace of God, but I was the architect of that second term.
“Wike was appointed Chief of Staff by me. As a Minister of State, I nominated him. I was under pressure by the President to drop him, I refused.
“The President persuaded me to drop him and bring a woman but I refused. I hear he is going all over town, saying I didn’t appoint him. I didn’t appoint him, the President appointed him, but I nominated him to be a Minister. I did but you know, character doesn’t come easily, character is a very difficult thing and I am a man of character,” Amaechi added.
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