The All Progressives Congress has slammed former Transportation Minister, Rotimi Amaechi, describing the former Rivers governor as a “leechy dependant” who is angry because he’s out of government.
A statement on Friday by the spokesman of the party, Felix Morka, condemned Amaechi’s call for protest in the face of hunger and general hardship in the country.
Amaechi had said he’s shocked that Nigerians have remained tolerant in the face of growing hardship and harrowing experience to access basic needs since Tinubu became president.
He said Nigerians were lukewarm and lacked the motivation to rise up against their governments and pointedly called them to pour out to the street to protest against Tinubu.
The former Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly had in 2023 also made derogatory statements against Tinubu questioning his qualifications for the office of president in the face of the Chicago certificate saga.
The APC said Amaechi was inciting Nigerians against the Tinubu administration despite spending over two decades in government where he acquired what he’s lavishly living on.
The statement read, “From the lavish comfort of his ‘proverbial glass house’, Rotimi Chibuike Amaechi, former Minister of Transport and Governor of Rivers state, in a recent interview, berated Nigerian youth for not protesting ‘high cost of living’ in the country to his morbid satisfaction.”
The party said Amaechi’s comments “are insensitive, god-awful and unpatriotic, coming from one of Nigeria’s longest serving and highest ranking political freeloaders – a two-term Speaker of the Rivers state House of Assembly, a two-term Governor, and a two-term Minister of Transport.”
According to the ruling party, “For almost all of his adult life, Amaechi, has been a leechy dependant on state resources, a voracious beneficiary of official patronage, and a leading participant in the generational devastation of our country’s economy.
“Attempting to hoodwink Nigerians into his web of false empathy and incitement to violence is hypocritical, provocative and dangerous.
“If those in power ‘steal money’ as Amaechi mischievously alleged, how come he can’t afford ‘to buy diesel’ barely two years after “stealing” for over 24 years in power as Speaker, Governor and Minister?”
The party emphasised that the “only real anger that Amaechi and his fellow tribesmen of naysayers of the likes of Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, and Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, must feel is that they are not in the saddle of government today. But that was a decision made by Nigeria’s ultimate political authority – the electorate.”
The statement described Nigerians as highly perceptive, discerning, demure, and mindful that economic discomforts associated with the administration’s inevitable reforms are transient and will pale into insignificance in comparison to the enduring transformative dividends which are already beginning to manifest.
Nigerians, the party said, will not be cajoled into taking back through street violence what they handed to the administration through the ballot, as Amaechi and his partisan tribesmen would wish.
It said it is “nauseating to think that these naysayer tribesmen who did absolutely nothing to improve the economy or living conditions for Nigerians while they were in office, now pontificate, endlessly, about what and how things should be done but didn’t and couldn’t do while in power.
“It’s as though they only regain their senses and discover their talents for governance when they are out of power.
“A tribe of naysayers, is what they are, who never see any good, only gloom, filled with bile and disdain for the determined strides of APC-administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to transform our country’s economy for the benefit of present and future generations of Nigerians.
“One would expect Amaechi to keep busy trying to solve the crippling crisis in Rivers state that he once governed. Instead, he has chosen to stoke anarchy on a national scale.”
The party added that “weaponizing protest and exploiting citizen’s economic discomfort for selfish political objectives, as these partisan tribesmen are doing, is irresponsible and decidedly unpatriotic.”
The party urged Nigerians to dismiss the “call to anarchy by Amaechi and his partisan tribesmen and to remain patient and continue to support President Tinubu’s bold effort to transform our country’s economy once and for all.”
President Tinubu has been in the UK for two weeks, in what his spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, said was a working leave.