Constitution amendment: Govs didn’t disagree –Amaechi

Posted by admin Constitution, Governors, Rivers, State News Thursday, November 29th, 2012

From GBENGA ADESUYI, Ibadan

Contrary to media report that the Nigerian Governors’ Forum (NGF) at its last meeting disagreed over the ongoing constitution amendment, the Chairman of the forum and Governor of Rivers State, Rotimi Amaechi yesterday said the governors had no cause to disagree over any of the issues tabled for discussion at the meeting.

Amaechi made this clarification yesterday in Ibadan, while on courtesy visit to the state Governor, Abiola Ajimobi after his condolence visit to the family of the late Justice Kayode Esho at his Ikolaba residence. He said: “We agreed on all the issues we discussed. We met in the morning by 10:00a.m and did not disperse until 3:00p.m, if we had disagreed we could have closed before 12:00p.m and not the time we closed.” The NGF chairman maintained that the concern of the forum had never been to satisfy personal interest, but the interest of Nigeria as a country.

“Our interests transcend local and primordial sentiments; some of us will be finishing our tenure in 2015 and hence would cease to be governors. “So if there has been anything personal, we will vacate the seat and such issues would no more avail us. These things we are doing, we are doing it for the benefit of the country. We will leave by 2015 so it can’t be to protect our personal interests. “If that were so, we will be looking at national because most of us are eyeing the national at the end of our tenure, instead, we are thinking of how to run a proper federalism. I don’t think the governors are doing what they are doing because they want to please or protect their own interests.

“Right now, we have a picture of a man whose head is very big, his stomach very big and a broad chest, but has tiny legs like that of a broomstick, that is what Nigeria looks like now. We are doing what we are doing because we believe that this country should be governed in a proper manner,” Amaechi stressed. On his visit to the late Esho family, he said it was to pay the man he met in 2008 when he was appointed the chairman of truth and reconciliatory committee in Rivers State and recalled that the late Esho did his job excellently well, saying: “He was a foremost jurist whose landmark judgment had impacted on the lives of the common man in the country.”

He commended Governor Ajimobi on his transformation agenda said to have impacted on the state capital, adding that the governor had changed the face of the state capital to a cleaner environment from a filthy set up. “Ibadan is not all that dirty as we have been made to hear. What we have seen on arrival into the state has shown a very clean environment.

I want to commend our governor for making the state clean and I hope that the transformation will revive the economy of the state because if the economy is revived, it will transform the lives of the people of the state,” he stated.

Via Sunwp_posts