Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State who is seeking re-election on Tuesday speaks to reporters in Port Harcourt on his motivation for public service.

Rivers State, from the figures released, gave the president the highest number of votes cast in last week’s election tell us, how this happened. How did you manage to win so big for the president? And respond also to the allegation of rigging by the CPC presidential candidate.

I’m not in a position to respond to his allegations because they limited the movement of the governors. I went to my unit to vote. I didn’t even go beyond my unit in my village. After voting, I went back to Port Harcourt and slept off only to wake up to hear results.

Gov. Rotimi Amaech:...“As a child growing up in that area, your parents are not able to take you to hospital because they are not able to fund the cost”

In my unit there was an improvement from that of the National Assembly. In the National Assembly we had 306 voters and then for  the presidency 368, so a difference of 62. So if you check that and approximate it round you know that there’s an increase. Obviously, that will account for the extra voters you have seen; enthusiasm by the citizens of Niger Delta to ensure that they supported their son.

It would have informed the large turnout of voters. But me, I limited myself to my unit where I voted and I’m sure that virtually everybody there voted for PDP, even though I didn’t wait for the votes to be counted……and I drove back. I was more apprehensive in the first one, so I personally monitored the results, calling people to find out the results.

But this one I knew everybody was voting for Jonathan, so I went home to sleep and woke up to be hearing results of different states and heard that of Rivers and all that. So, I’m not in position to say what happened nation wide.

How does giving Jonathan the highest votes make you feel?

It was expected. I said it before the election that in view of the fact that Goodluck grew up here in Port Harcourt , he didn’t grow up in Bayelsa, he is from Bayelsa, but he didn’t grow up there. Don’t forget Bayelsa was part of the old Rivers State.

Either his primary and secondary education, I don’t know where he had his secondary education but at least at the university, he was a pioneer student of the University of Port Harcourt , and obviously you should expect that he’s known in Port Harcourt .

He worked here in Port Harcourt , grew up here; only left here when he became a deputy governor. It’s less than 10 years ago, so he’s known here  and you expect that people would generally support him, that I knew and was expected.

Do you envisage a similar turnout of voters on Tuesday when you will be running?

Perhaps, but you should realize that this is a local election, we did aggregate interest in the case of President Jonathan. Now, there will be difference, the interest is not as high as who becomes the governor; everybody wants his own man there.

So, does that make you foresee a strong opposition?

I don’t think I foresee strong opposition. I expect to win. I expect to win in view of the fact that there are physical projects that you can see

Not even with the still challenge by ACN?

What challenge? ACN is not on ground in Rivers State. There are so many ways to look at the election: I come from Ikwerre Local Government Area, so you expect that Ikwerre will support me, and I heard that Ikwerre Local Government Area has 109,000 registered voters. The best way to assess the governorship election is to look at the National Assembly election.

Most people don’t know who the candidates for the National Assembly election are. So it was PDP, Governor Amaechi; ACN, Abiye Sekibo; APGA, Celestine Omehia. That was what we saw on that day, and they were defeated. Celestine, we come from the same ward, from the same family; we defeated him there. His excuse was that he never sponsored any candidate for National Assembly. Same thing with Sekibo. We defeated him even in his ward.

Despite all our assurances some people are still sending the information that there will be violence in the state. They are not even saying PDP will be violent; they say, ‘you know we have the bad boys, the militants are here, we are bringing them out on election day’. But have they forgotten that as governor of Rivers State I have never taken security lightly? So, just like it happened in the National Assembly election, when they said, ‘oh, it would be violent’ and it was violence free. The same thing will happen in the governorship election, it will be violence – free.

Maybe, you should tell us a bit of some of those things very dear to you that you have done for the people of Rivers State that also give you confidence that come what may they are more likely to give you their support than to any other candidate.

Uppermost in my heart is our investment in education and health. We have been able to provide free education, free health care…. In the free education, unlike before where they do free tuition, and they referred to it as free education, we’ve gone a step further than it used to be in the country to provide free tuition, free school uniform, free sandals, free books and at the secondary level free boarding. In secondary schools, we are building, we are making it compulsory for the children to board.

The textbooks for all the subjects you are studying at the primary school level are free, at the secondary school level free…. Cabinet opposed me seriously on it. They felt that if we don’t tax them, if we don’t ensure that parents pay for something, they will not value it, that value is usually attached to something that they fund.

I said yes, I don’t know how many of you here grew up in Diobu, I did, so I understand what poverty is. I know what it took for me to go to school. The president said he went to school without sandals. I did that from primary one to close to class three in secondary school. So, it was not easy….. I don’t know if you’ve lived in what is called ‘yard’ 13th where you have to queue up to go to toilet and if you don’t wake up very early and you are the thirteenth person on the queue, you can imagine what will happen to you, and then if you have to go to school at 7.30am.

So, if you saw those challenges and now you are living in a condition that is different from that, you must not forget that those challenges are still there, only a very small per cent of the people who were there have left, the rest of the people are still there, so you need to do something….

The best you can do is to try and extricate them from the crushing effect of poverty and what are those things that affect them most?…. I knew how my father used to go around and borrow money to pay for my school fees. As for books, they don’t bother buying because they don’t have the money, so the children get half_baked education because they don’t have books to read.

And we were not able to form reading habit because there were no books to read. And sandals come with uniforms, so if I say that I went to school without sandals, it meant that my father bought me uniform but there were no sandals.

The next thing….that for me that is pressing is the fact that most parents are not able to take their children to hospital so they would approach pharmacist stores. As a child growing up in that area, your parents are not able to take you to hospital because they are not able to fund the cost so what do they do? They go to what they refer to as chemist shop and say ‘give me malaria medicine’.

How do you know it’s malaria? The only way you will know is if you go to the hospital. So, we say we will build health centres. We have commissioned a lot and they have doctors.  It’s usually said that accessibility must come with the ability of individuals to pay_affordability.

So, if you say you have given access by building, if there’s no affordability you have not provided access, so even without the support of the cabinet I insisted on free health care. So, providing the hospitals and free health care will enable  the people to approach the health centres. We have a problem in the rural areas: people are still not going to the health centres.

How soon will that rail project end?

I can’t be too specific on that for now, you know we have had cash squeeze, so that has affected the timeline.
What about the new Greater Port Harcourt city

National Sports Festival is in June. You will see activities there. Rivers State University of Science and Technology (RSUST) is under construction there, the stadium is nearing completion… they’ve completed lawn tennis, volleyball, basketball, swimming pool, those ones are ready….the  stadium we are building has the capacity for 25,000. We are doing internal roads connecting them to the Port Harcourt_ Owerri road, taking you out to the road that leads to the airport.

Are there mistakes you would like to correct in your second coming? Are there things you would like to do differently?

The mistakes won’t be in construction, they would be in administration. There were people who have come when we were new and took advantage of our inexperience.