By Emma Okocha
IT was like another of the many conventions of the Nigerian peoples resident in the USA. The Hilton Hotel Rivers Town Meeting at Henden, a few miles from the International Dulles airport, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, carried the familiar badges.

The gay glitters of the exotic African beauty, wrapped from head to the ankles, with equally outlandish colors that challenge the banquet lights. Fashion, the most pronounced form of the arts was on parade. And those Rivers girls, so beautiful, some too fobbish and others, too much to wear.  Others barely enough to cover the navel; always around to tempt the man to renounce his imprisonment, his family values.

There were glimpses of the familiar rustles and insecure hustles of our own brothers and sisters who few months back, were with us here in the US.

Somehow, they have managed, through their not so noble antics, attracted His Excellency’s ears and eyes and are now right there at the corridors of power. Their capabilities while in the diaspora are not hidden and that goes further than any other factor, to determine and help the observer, to define the boss’s depth and his other men in government.  Tell me who your friends are, then, we can say what you are.

Constantly at the beck and call of these man Fridays, badgering into them, sometimes joining them in their various acts of sycophantic open theaters, are another set of our own, mostly, respected college professors.

Philosophers of the moon and astronomy, immigration attorneys, who need to go home as many of their clients have been heading home since the melt down redefined America and the American dream. Mortgage and Real Estate former moguls, the greatest losers of the last dispensation.

Some of the Lottery winners who left their very good jobs in Nigeria and came here to be shaving dirty beards of asylum inmates. There is a very regrettable case of a former Unilag bursar. He came here last year, and was employed as a tree climber. He never told his children that the money he was sending to them came from earnings he made, climbing trees.

The children and one grandchild were astounded about the whole ordeal of their father when they received a call from the hospital. Papa America has broken his old pelvis. He had fallen from a tree!

With all these court jesters all over the place, and with everyone of them working on his or her little agenda, why would an equally little minded ‘’Excellency’’ seeing his opportunity to arrest the unchallenged audience, not ascend the pulpit, appropriate the microphone to himself and go ahead and pour out his pedestrian philosophies about government and assault the captive audience with his purported and delivered dividends of democracy.

Most of those Excellencies have gone home boasting about how they took over the US and those Nigeria Americans!

This is correct for in the last one month, we have seen a lot Nigerian Governors come to town. One South Eastern Governor, kept his people waiting for him till the wee hours of the night. When he showed up, he abused his jelly audience and announced he was going for dinner with a member of the US Congress at a time America had retired and gone to bed.

Another Excellency was here recently, and did not hide it. He openly asked for a favor. He demanded that packs of the ‘V’ empowerment prescription be shipped to him before he would hold audience with his people.

At the Rivers Town Hall meeting, we noted that Governor Rotimi Amaechi, his able Commissioners and Special Advisers did not keep his people waiting.

The Governor who though delivered a long speech and engaged discussions on a very long items and projects was very direct when he spoke on the crisis and the Amnesty that was granted to the Niger Delta Freedom Fighters.

He said that the ten percent of the oil revenues granted directly to each producing communities has brought new hopes to the Niger Delta and cemented the second term aspirations of the President.

He believed that the fighting youths would take advantage of the amnesty, return to school and become responsible members of the society.

Speaking specifically on his development plans for the Rivers State, the Governor declared that a new Port Harcourt city would be built. And that city will be as good if not greater than the city of Dubai.
(Details of the Governor Rotimi, Ameachi Interview will be published next week)