Mrs. Patience Jonathan
The
Rivers State Governor and Chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, Mr.
Rotimi Amaechi, on Friday said the wife of the President, Mrs. Patience
Jonathan, lied against him in her public account of the
misunderstanding between him and the President’s wife a few weeks ago.
The governor spoke in Port Harcourt when
clergymen of the Niger Delta Bishops Forum paid him a courtesy visit at
the Government House.
He said it was important for the public to have a true picture of what transpired between him and the President’s wife.
He said, “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.
“There was no time I pushed my wife away
and there is 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 to 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.”
Amaechi said his perceived
misunderstanding with the First Lady arose out of his desire to provide
an environment conducive for learning for the children of Okrika; the
home town of Mrs. Jonathan, adding that he had enormous respect for both
President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife.
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.
Amaechi expressed the hope that the mediation would work.
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.”
Amaechi, who agreed that Mrs. Jonathan
was his mother, however, argued that no mother would take away a state
police commissioner to the detriment of her son.
He further said, “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.”
Governor Amaechi also spoke on the issue
of Nyesom Wike, the Minister of State for Education, whom he nominated
for appointment as minister.
“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 said.
Earlier, the leader of the delegation,
Rt. Rev. James Aye Oruwori, said they came because they needed the
governor’s permission to intervene in the prolonged crisis in the state
and the dispute between the governor and the First Lady.
Oruwori explained that they took the
challenge to intervene in the crisis without external influence, having
also visited Mrs. Jonathan to restore the peace that existed in the
state.
Oruwori said, “It is not an exaggeration
to say that we have been praying but then prayer without faith is
classified as dead and it is on this note we have taken upon ourselves
to make a move to seek for peace. The scripture says precisely in
Matthew 5:9 that ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children
of God.”
When contacted for the First Lady’s
reaction, Acting Spokeperson for Mrs Jonathan, Mrs. A.O Aderogba,
promised to get back to our correspondent but she never did.
culled from Punch
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