Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi, is currently being celebrated by members of the opposition parties and some critics of President Goodluck Jonathan over what they termed his “sweet victory” over the president and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) leadership following his  re-election, last Friday, as chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF).

The celebration sequel to Amaechi’s NGF victory was rather multilateral, including the yet to be registered but badly fractured Allied Progressive Congress (APC) hoping to make an unprecedented political capital out of what is commonly felt in the Niger Delta to be Governor Amaechi’s growing opposition to the Jonathan presidency. And when it emerged, late Monday, that he had been suspended by his party following the charge of anti-party activities, the strident voice of 2015 no-hopers, together with their active collaborators and infantry soldiers in the media, rose in democratic theorising which is sadly not correlated by practice.

To all intents and purposes, Amaechi’s ongoing campaign is to install himself as the next vice president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (in hopes of a Yar’Adua scenario?) acting in concert with the northern oligarchy which brought the country to its present ruinous state in the first place. However, he is clearly working at cross purposes with the people of the South-South geopolitical zone. But there are quite a number of intricate issues that threaten to put a dent on Amaechi’s ambition in the context of geo-ethnic configurations and 2015 politics. This ambition,may be realised in the opposition to APC in the event that it fails to sail through in the PDP. Thus, in using the NGF platform to advance personal desires rather than  promoting peer review mechanisms and the exchange of ideas for national development, politically legitimate insofar as it derives from an ambition, Amaechi’s forum has become an opposition to the PDP government, and this point was recently attested to by no less an individual than the Board of Trustees chairman of the PDP, Chief Tony Anenih. This fact, taken together with the reality of strident opposition and legislative excess at the House of Representatives, means that Jonathan, apart from the daily confronting Boko Haram terrorism  in the North, does not have any reason to trust Amaechi. Therefore, assuming but not conceding that “Jonathan is playing 2015 politics with the NGF,” are the critics really not saying anything meaningful?

According to observers, Jonathan is a politician and has the political right to secure his position in the face of onslaughts from any quarter. They content that the logic by which Amaechi has all the right in the world to hurl insults at the person of the president and his wife, saying that his problem in Rivers PDP emanated from “Madam and Oga at the top”…  but  that his Commander-in-Chief has no right to reply him is  simply illiterate. Indeed, the recent grounding, in Akure, OndoState, of Amaechi’s bombardier jet, over which many questions have been posed by Amaechi’s own people, was taken as an indication of Federal Government onslaught on the Rivers governor, yet  no one has come out with concrete proof that the charges preferred against him by the NACA authorities were false.

In Ekiti State, Dr Kayode Fayemi who is currently delivering lectures in the newspapers on the “undemocratic” action of the group of governors (the Jonah Jang group) in not accepting Amaechi’s leadership, Honourable Opeyemi Bamidele is under alleged serious assaults over his ambition to unseat Fayemi, with his loyalist recently rooted out from different political positions, while even the posters of PDP governorship aspirants are being mutilated by vandals. Another example: a certain comrade recently organised a sham election. However, in spite of the frenzied attempt by the opposition  masquerading as disinterested judges to drag the president into the murky waters of Amaechi’s NGF, the president has maintained his non-involvement in the fracas, urging the governors to sort out their differences in the interest of national unity. This remains a key challenge.

In the build up to the NGF election, governors in the South-East geopolitical zone had met, resolving to throw their weight behind whoever the PDP would present for the election, while the Northern governors had to settle for Plateau’s Jonah Jang after prolonged disagreement between Governor Isa Yuguda and Ibrahim Shema (Katsina) over who should step down for the other. Eventually, Jang’s candidature came up as a consensus candidate, particularly against the backdrop of the rotation of power entrenched in the NGF constitution.

On election day as the governors gathered inside the Rivers Lodge, some governors asked Amaechi to dissolve the executive and step down before the election could hold. This, he was said to have stoutly refused to do, going on to conduct the election which, as Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State has declared, he did not even have the right to contest since re-election was not captured in the NGF constitution. Thus, it would appear to critical observers that Amaechi not only over-reached himself, working on the assumption that all his colleagues, some of them at least two decades his political seniors, would simply queue  behind him in his ambition to use the NGF as a platform for his ambition, working in concert with the opposition. Again, this would mean that he was ready to rule by force whether or not those whom he wanted to preside over desired his leadership or not.

A list of 19 governors had endorsed Jang ahead of the election. Indeed, an impromptu meeting presided over by Jang at the Benue Governors’ Lodge in Abuja on Saturday morning had 18 governors in attendance, effectively sealing Amaechi’s fate. Governors Olusegun Mimiko (Ondo), Isa Yuguda, Pater Obi and others who spoke at the meeting dismissed the Friday election as a sham, with Mimiko pointing out that the Amaechi group had even craftily nominated him for the deputy chairmanship of the NGF, after he had already been approached by the Jang group. It was thus no surprise that he (Mimiko) promptly withdrew from the sham election.

Eighteen(18) governors  signed the communiqué released after the Saturday meeting presided over by Jang.  The question asked by observers is, if Amaechi claimed to have had 19 votes on Friday, how was Jang able to preside over a meeting of 18 governors on Saturday, and only at short notice? The simple truth is that Amaechi has been left to preside over the APC governors through whom he has achieved his desires in the NGF and hopes to make the 2015 vice presidency.

Godwin Ekpetiis an Abuja based legal practitioner.