Wole Soyinka’s affection for Rivers governor, Rotimi Amaechi, has never been a secret. On several occasions, the respected scholar and activist has openly taken sides with the Rivers governor especially in his many battles against Pres. Goodluck Jonathan and his wife, Patience Jonathan.
On Thursday, Soyinka was a special guest at the launch of a book – ‘Dynamics of Change: The Amaechi Years’ – written in honour of Amaechi by the duo of Chidi Amuta, a writer and journalist, and Yemi Ogunbiyi, a former managing director of Daily Times.
You can read up on what APC leader Bola Tinubu said about Gov. Amaechi at the event below:
As for Soyinka, he recounted how he had been asked by a friend of his in the presidential villa to advise Gov. Amaechi to stop criticising Pres. Jonathan as the president was certain to be reelected.
Soyinka said that Amaechi and Tinubu were the two architects of the APC victory in the general elections
He said, “In the political atmosphere today, whatever you call it, change or hope or cautious hope and or careless hope, I recognise two personalities in particular who led the chant of change. One of them, I call him the architect of the process, the architect in fact, that houses the essence of hope – Bola Tinubu.
“The other person (Amaechi) was unconsciously, perhaps, the arrowhead of that charge that led to the change and that is the man that we gather here to celebrate.
“He was the one who said no, we cannot turn the clock backwards. Nothing about the philosophy of the clock runs against what we were hoping for. It was a very unpopular and risky decision to take. But it exposed to us the basic arithmetic fallacy of governance in demonstrating that when 16 is said to be higher than 19, something is fundamentally wrong and the same kind of arithmetic leads to the cooking of figures in governance.
“And it was within that nexus that he stood up and challenged even his own colleagues, and said let’s change the mentality of the stock, let us re-orientate it towards the people and towards the nation and the electorate.”
