Nyesom Wike, the incoming governor of Rivers state, says he would probe the administration of Rotimi Amaechi, the outgoing governor of the state. Amaechi, who got elected in 2007 after serving as the speaker of the state house of assembly for eight years, would be rounding off his second term on Friday. The governor, who has never hidden his dissent in having Wike succeed him, taunted his successor recently. “I think Nyesom Wike is coming, we are waiting. He will look for money for salary; there is none. We are enduring the pain because we are paying our loans. Maybe he is lucky because we have paid out a lot of our loans if not all. So, he will have to manage. I’m not joking, we have no money anywhere.
In Rivers state, there is no money,” Amaechi had said at a thanksgiving service in Port Harcourt, earlier in the month. Unlike other states of the country where the outgoing and incoming governments have transition and inauguration committees, irrespective of political differences, the situation in Rivers was different. After weeks of trying effortlessly to reach a consensus with his former benefactor, Wike eventually set up his own transition committee. The committee was chaired by Tele Ikuru, outgoing deputy governor of the state, who defected to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) from the All Progressives Congress (APC), a few weeks to the presidential election.
Speaking on Monday when he received the report of the committee, Wike said he would “check the ills of the past”. “I am not going to be intimidated. The only way we can work together is to check the ills of the past. The right thing must be done. Those who have stolen the resources of the state must be made to account,” he said. “I have the political will to drive the process to its logical conclusion. The massive stealing of government resources was a deliberate attempt to create problems for the incoming administration. “All the top officials of Amaechi administration who have refused to cooperate in the interest of Rivers state during the transition period will soon cooperate whether they like it or not. “Those who have closed the courts will be the same persons rushing to the courts when we open the courts.”
Earlier, Ikuru recommended that the new administration should carry out forensic “audit of all accounts in view of massive looting by officials of the out-going administration”. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, minister of finance and coordinating minister of the economy, had recently said Amaechi got a total of N257.6 billion from the excess crude account (ECA) between January and October 2013. She said this in response to the request of the Nigerian governors’ forum, which alleged that $20 billion was missing from the ECA and that she should account for it. Okonjo-Iweala subsequently said she would release details of the allocations that all the states in the country got from 2011 to 2015. When she eventually released the record, Rivers ranked as the second state with the highest allocation after Akwa Ibom. The total amount of allocation of Rivers stood at N237.4 billion and Akwa Ibom N265 billion.
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