by Kolapo Olapoju

Nobel laureate, Prof. Wole Soyinka, says he was advised to warn Rivers state governor, Rotimi Amaechi against taking on President Goodluck Jonathan during the Nigeria Governors’ Forum crisis of 2013.

Soyinka, however, said he refused to deliver the message, instead he studied and observed Amaechi more closely.

During the public presentation of  “Dynamics of Change: The Amaechi Years”, a book edited by a former Managing Director of Daily Times, Yemi Ogunbiyi, and author, Chidi Amuta, the revered wordsmith described Amaechi as the second person after Bola Tinubu, who is largely responsible for the ‘charge that led to change’ witnessed in the recently concluded general elections.

He said: “In the political atmosphere today, whatever you call it, change or hope or cautious hope and or careless hope, I recognise two personalities in particular who led the chant of change. One of them, I call him the architect of the process, the architect in fact, that houses the essence of hope Bola Tinubu. The other person (Amaechi) was unconsciously, perhaps, the arrowhead of that charge that led to the change and that is the man that we gather here to celebrate.”

“He was the one who said no, we cannot turn the clock backwards. Nothing about the philosophy of the clock runs against what we were hoping for. It was a very unpopular and risky decision to take. But it exposed to us the basic arithmetic fallacy of governance in demonstrating that when 16 is said to be higher than 19, something is fundamentally wrong and the same kind of arithmetic leads to the cooking of figures in governance.”

“And it was within that nexus that he stood up and challenged even his own colleagues, and said let’s change the mentality of the stock, let us re-orientate it towards the people and towards the nation and the electorate.”

“I remember someone very close to me that said I hear you are close to Rotimi Amaechi, tell that young man that he is going to destroy himself, and I said, you know something, you have been in a position where I have had the opportunity of being your teacher and your mentor and you mean to say you never learnt from me that it is better to be destroyed on the basis of what you really live for? And you want me to deliver such a message? That person who is in Aso Rock wanted me to tell Amaechi to back off, to slow down and that he is playing with fire and playing with a catapult against big guns. I never delivered that message. All I did was to study him more closely and wait to see.”

Kolapo Olapoju