Amaechi’s Rumuobullshit — by Bamidele Johnson
Rotimi Amaechi’s claim that his mother’s death at 89 was caused by the Tinubu administration’s policies should be laid over Fela’s verse, “that my mama wey you kill” or “gbogbo aye pa yeye re je”. That way, it would have more emotional weight. Maybe a few talking drums in the background too. Politics, after all, must not only be argued. It must be properly scored.
Amaechi has consistently demonstrated more commitment to emotion than logic. His heart rules. The heart, as we know, ain’t so smart. His own is just totally dim, daft and, not unreasonable to say, devious. It seems to have developed a curious allergy to causality, particularly whenever there is a microphone nearby.
Unfair? Nyet. Amaechi’s resume of Rumuorubbish convicts him. Last year, it was Rumuohungry, when he announced that he had become hungry under Tinubu. The hungry man celebrated his 60th birthday with an event that did not exactly look like the inaugural meeting of the Nigerian Association of the Starving. The celebration was rather, shall we say, more than nutritionally adequate and was accompanied by blinding glitz.
Then came the wedding of one of his children, another ceremony that could hardly be described as prosaic. It was a grand affair, with an assortment of Nigeria’s political and social aristocracy in attendance. Yet, the man was hungry.
This year, Rumuohungry has evolved into Rumuomourning.
His mother died at 89. Sad event, that. And the grief of a son should not be mocked. But Amaechi has taken the grief and attached a political invoice to it. His claim is that his mother was healthy before Tinubu became president, but that the rising cost of meds subsequently made it difficult for him to buy her drugs and that Tinubu’s policies therefore killed her.
There is, of course, a serious argument to be made about the rising cost of medicines and the effect of economic policies on access to healthcare. But there is a rather spectacular leap between saying medicines became more expensive and saying something that is clearly intended to be understood as “Tinubu killed my mother”. One is an argument about economic policy. The other is practically asking the coroner to add the president to the death certificate.
Well, there is still the deliciously awkward question. Amaechi is not exactly a man who has spent his adult life wondering where his next meal or his next naira would come from. He has occupied some of the meatiest political positions available. Speaker, governor and minister, consecutively over almost a quarter of a century. Unless he has had an acute gambling and drinking addiction, we cannot exactly be invited to believe that the economic climate became so devastating that he could not afford to keep his mother medicated.
Do I understand that medicines can become prohibitively expensive? Of course. Do I understand that economic hardship can kill? Absolutely. Do I understand that government policies can have consequences for people’s ability to access healthcare? Certainly. What I do not understand is the sudden transformation of a complicated socio-economic chain into a personalised presidential assassination.
Amaechi’s home state, Rivers, is also where the cyclonic Wike hails from. Unlike Amaechi, he is not starving. He is the proud owner of a Rolls Royce, acquired, according to his account, through a hefty inheritance from his late father, who was a general manager of a company that must have been in the Fortune 100 category. He is also such a lovely chap that his in-laws bought him some eye-catching property in the US. Most of us would want such in-laws.
But we all know this is Rumuononsense.
