Waking Up As Ministers -By Ike Willie-Nwobu

Rotimi Amaechi wants Nigerians to stop fleeing their country.

You can sleep and wake up as a minister or governor, he says. According to him, jobs are all there are in foreign countries (the suffocating nine to give cycle). Here, you get opportunities.

It is interesting to hear the former Minister of transportation speak. The former Rivers State Governor was a key man during Muhammadu Buhari’s eight years in office.

Since leaving office, he has been mostly silent, like many of his colleagues. His slight misfortune now that he is gradually finding his voice once again is that Nigerians are now the wiser.

They know who speaks for them from the heart. They also know their emergency defenders.
On Arise News, Amaechi said that staying in Nigeria can get one into political office.

As a key man during the disastrous administration of Muhammadu Buhari, Amaechi must have spoken from a place of knowledge.

Political office. It would be extremely naïve to pretend that is not almost all there is in the country these days.

Together with banditry, politics is the only other lucrative business in Nigeria today.

The desperate, disparate politics of the All Progressives Congress showed as much in 2023,as did the shenanigans of INEC and the shambles of some courts.

Amaechi wants Nigerians to stop leaving the country and instead aspire to political office.

He wants young Nigerians to ignore the siren calls of greener pastures and instead hope for the lottery of political office.

Amaechi may have been speaking from a place of genuine alarm at the number of young Nigerians pouring out of the country. But it did not stop him from betraying the mindset that has enabled himself and others of his ilk to hold Nigeria to ransom.

Political careerism is all they know. It is what they do. From being Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly to Governor of the State and Minister in Nigeria, he is still on the lookout for a new political position. He committed as t least a hundred million to be president and lost.

Politics for people like Amaechi is all about power and relevance. Nothing about service or development.

Where are the jobs? What of infrastructure? No healthcare, no security, no happiness. Nigerians fleeing the country go to other countries searching for the fundaments of human survival and happiness.

Of course, Amaechi does not understand this. He is a firm fixture in Nigeria’s privileged political class from whose ostentatious tables others must scramble for crumbs.

Amaechi wants Nigeria’s young, who envision better lives elsewhere, to remain here.

He wants those so summarily and ill-advisedly branded ‘lazy’ by his principal in 2016 to sell their future and use the proceeds to purchase the lottery ticket of future political office.

The crowning moment of Amaechi’s time in office was establishing the university of transportation in Buhari’s hometown of Daura. What has the university done so far to stanch the distress of Nigeria’s disgruntled young people?

The media houses which invite these expired politicians to air their egregious views should know that they have nothing important to say. The noise they make upon invitation only serves to drown out important voices and drain the media houses of credibility.

Amaechi clearly thinks that Nigeria is an accident. To him, Nigeria is a happy coincidence where someone can sleep jobless and wake up a minister or a governor.

He has no explanation for the chaos here. He does not think there is anything wrong with those who occupy political offices here. He prescribes political office as the highest ambition, the panacea to the perpetual problem of unemployment and despair.

The people who kill, steal and destroy to occupy political office in Nigeria are not Nigerians. In fact, they are alien to the Nigerian spirit.

Those who ask others to snatch, grab and run with ballot boxes are not Nigerians. Their dark desperation opposes the Nigerian spirit.

It is wrong for the entire aspirations of a Nigerian to center around leaving the country. But it is also faulty to ask Nigerians who stay back to aspire only to political office.

Nigerians deserve a strong economy, quality infrastructure and security. Nigerians are not averse to a country where things work.

Children in Nigeria deserve quality education and fair employment when they are done. Not the joblessness and despair that is pushing the best of them to all manner of foreign countries.

Amaechi spoke about waking up as a governor or minister to Nigeria’s young people. How old is he? How old are his contemporaries and colleagues that are governors and ministers now.

How old is the president he supported to emerge? Even when he was Governor of Rivers State, how many young people did he appoint to political office? How many women?

Ignorance may be bliss. But when such ignorance is blatant, is immeasurably dangerous.

The young people Amaechi supposedly advised must ignore him. They must push for a better country. Failing that, they must push their way out of a country where the odds are stacked against them.

Ike Willie-Nwobu,
Ikewilly9@gmail.com