As the 19th March re
run elections in Rivers State hit the home run, as it were, former governor of the state and current Minister of Transportation, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, re-emerged after what seemed like an interminable hiatus. Amaechi came swinging and doubling down on incendiary rhetoric and played his part in the preposterous diatribe begun by the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Dakuku Peterside against the Supreme Court.
Before his re-emergence, Amaechi’s present reincarnation was almost unrecognisable from his previous existence. I’m not referring to the physical makeover where  now he dumps the Goodluck Jonathan’s trademark hat. Indeed, he needed to slough off that identity having cast himself as the archetypal Judas Iscariot. I refer, instead, to the sudden taciturnity of a man who made a name for being garrulous and engaging in uncontrolled behaviour during Jonathan’s presidency.
In the lead-up to the rerun polls, Amaechi’s love for histrionics was on display again as he hopped from one media house to another promoting an ignoble agenda of setting his own state on fire in order to regain control of the levers of power he lost last year in a backlash against his incredibly poor leadership as governor.
Nigerians have moved on since the 2015 elections except in Rivers; not because the elections elsewhere were better, but because Rivers State appears to be cursed with a disproportionate slew of self-entitled prima donnas led by Amaechi, who believe in their superior wisdom, that it’s their way or no way. And they’ve been creating a spectacle in the Nigerian public space that would have been so entertaining were it not so tragic.
But finding the control they seek elusive, Amaechi and company seem to have decided on a campaign of scorched-earth against their own state by fomenting a climate of instability. After using the pretext of insecurity to perpetuate a false narrative against the 2015 elections, they notched up the hilarity by also pooh-poohing the 19th March polls in which the entire coercive apparatus of the government of Nigeria was given to Amaechi.
It’s a disturbingly familiar strategy: cry wolf before every election; after every defeat, serve up an account that negates the outcome and call for cancellation; keep doing it until you win! Our people and resources are doomed to an unending election circle at this rate.
On 19th March,  Amaechi got everything he could have wished for, including a personal battalion of soldiers in a show of might that calls the federal government’s integrity to serious question. To justify the call for soldiers, he and Peterside had again invented .stories of political killings and ratcheted up themes of over-arching violence. And a federal government which was apparently on cue and chomping at the bits, duly obliged.
It was a stunning irony by an administration that campaigned against the use of soldiers in elections while in opposition; an action that poured scorn on its moral high ground in Ekiti and Osun states.
By all accounts, the size of troops deployed in Rivers State puts the combined figures in those two states in the shades, not to mention their direct participation in the polls. The unmistakable subtext is the fixation with Rivers State. In spite of all, though, it was another sobering defeat for the man his supporters call ‘lion’.
Amaechi’s electoral reverses are music to the ears in Rivers State and, I dare say, the Niger Delta. That of 19th March also had a definitive ring to it: it put paid to the myriad of sponsored falsehood in the media regarding the 2015 elections and affirmed, invariably, that all politics is local. So, whilst outsiders are drawn to Amaechi like a honeypot and derive a sense of exotic entertainment watching him decimate his heritage and impoverish his people, he is a veritable political outcast at home for precisely the same reasons.
Chimamanda reminds us that the “nationalism that means we should aspire to indifference about our own individual cultures is stupid”. As unfolding realities today make even clearer, our diversity does not evince a coalescence of regional or even state interests. Therefore, acting in utter disregard of this national axiom is gross deviance, the type that borders on irrationality.
Bob, a lawyer, wrote in from Abuja.
To be continued.

Solomon Bob