Governor of Rivers State, Rt. Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi has said he is being persecuted by Dame Patience Jonathan, Nigeria's First Lady, simply because of his desire to provide an environment conducive to learning for the children of Okrika, Mrs. Jonathan's home town.
Amaechi, who spoke when members of the Niger Delta Bishops’ Forum visited him at the Government House, Port Harcourt on Friday as part of their efforts to mediate the political crisis in the state, maintained that despite the misunderstanding, he still has enormous respect for both President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife, Patience.
The battle between Patience Jonathan and Amaechi had shifted to the Rivers State House of Assembly recently with five members attempting to impeach the leadership of the House. The ensuing fracas resulted in some of the members sustaining serious injury.
Weeks back, the bishops visited the First Lady and Minister of State for Education, Nyesom Wike, in Abuja as part of their efforts to resolve the issues. Narrating the incident that led to the crisis between him and the first lady, Amaechi said: “My lords, I don’t know what to say, believe me. The only thing I want to say to you is that I want to be put on record that the wife of the president said that when my wife came to beg me, I pushed her away. I have never quarrelled with my wife publicly, and I will never quarrel with my wife publicly.
“So there is no time I pushed my wife away, and there is no time I will push my wife away. I just want to correct that so that nobody goes away with the impression that somebody told my wife ‘go and talk to your husband, she came and I pushed her away'.
“No, that day I simply walked away into a bus and I sat down until they finished. So all I did was go back to the bus to enable my wife perform her official function of someone who had received the wife of the president and escort her to all the places she wanted to go to.”
Wondering if the mediation embarked upon by the clergymen would work, he said: “Niger Delta monarchs came and no result came out of it and since you are men of God I hope that, this one, God will bless it.
“I hope so because that is the same way I spoke to them (the monarchs) and they said, ‘watch out, it will work’, and they never returned because it never worked. There are so many persons who had come to mediate but nothing came out of it.
“If it is peace that everybody wants, I am ready for peace. When you say you are seeking permission, I am wondering why, because if you did not have the permission you would not have gone to see the wife of the president. The mere fact that you have seen the wife of the president means that you have initiated the peace move, so you don’t require any further approval than the approval of God that you have started with.”
Continuing, the governor said there were aspects of the story that needed to be corrected.
“Please allow me correct those ones too because when you spoke with the wife of the president, she spoke publicly. She said, and I concede to her, that she is my mother. As wife of the president who is the head of government and head of the nation, she is my mother and you expect that as my mother, she should be able to protect her son.
“No mother takes away a police commissioner to the detriment of her son, so when next you see my mother, please tell her that she should try and protect her son.
“The other aspect is the Okrika story, when she visited. Like I said, as the governor, by protocol, I will receive the president and you know that the president is not just our president, he is the head of the nation but when the wife of the president came, I went to receive her at the airport and she slept in Port Harcourt.
“The next day she came up with a programme that was not part of the official programme, and what was the programme? She wanted her people to receive her in Okrika. There was no plan, there was no protocol arrangement, nothing.
“We just had to quickly arrange protocol to take her to the place. But to do that we wanted to also show her, as part of her own programme, not our programme, projects we had done in Okrika.
“So we took her to the Rufus Ada-George Ring Road in Okrika, which we started and completed and then somewhere, we saw a health centre and a primary school and I said stop, let me show her this health centre. We looked at the health centre and we were satisfied.
“At the primary school, there were houses around the primary school too close for comfort, no football field, no playground, no space at all around the school and I turned to the wife of the President and said: ‘Your Excellency Ma, we have not finished with this building, we would buy the houses that are surrounding the primary school and demolish them.’
“Once she heard the word 'demolish', the wife of the president flared up and took the microphone from me and started all sorts of diatribes that I won’t mention here for the respect I have for the office of the wife of the president.
“I felt that it was wrong to confront the wife of the [resident publicly. When she finished, I withdrew and walked into the bus. When we got to the ground of the reception, which was not part of our programme, which she just included by herself, I came down from the bus and went to sit in one of the primary schools. That is where she said my wife met me.
“How did the wife of the president know that my wife met me and I pushed her away when she was supposed to be in a public ceremony? Was she standing with me and my wife in that primary school and saw me push my wife away?
“So it is important that you get to know this and it is important that the public knows that the altercation between myself and the wife of the president was as a result of providing services to her place, the Okrika people...
“If you build a primary school and the place is surrounded by people who are cooking and selling and buying, that is not a conducive atmosphere for learning and we did not say we would come there with caterpillars and demolish; we said we would buy the houses from the people and pay them off to be able to get a football field and provide playground for the children and fence off the school so that we can protect them from paedophiles, that was what happened.”
On his disagreement with Minister of State for Education, Nyesom Wike whom he nominated for appointment as Minister, the governor said: “I hear you also visited Nyesom Wike. I try not to talk about Wike. I say so because he is my subordinate, I try not to talk about him but I hear you visited him.
“Why I won’t talk about him is that Nyesom Wike, his second tenure as Obio Akpor Council Chairman was by the grace of God but I was the architect of that second term. Nyesom Wike was appointed Chief of Staff by me. Nyesom Wike as Minister of State, I nominated him.
“I was under pressure by the president to drop him, I refused. The president persuaded me to drop him and bring a woman but I refused. I hear he is going all over town saying I didn’t appoint him. I didn’t appoint him, the president appointed him but I nominated him to be Minister. But you know, character doesn’t come easily; character is a very difficult thing and I am a man of character.”
Leader of the group, Rt. Rev. James Aye Oruwori told the governor that they were in Port Harcourt to get the governor’s permission to intervene in the crisis in the state as well as the dispute between the him and Patience Jonathan. They explained that they decided to intervene without external influence to restore the much-desired peace in the state.
“We want to first of all appreciate your gracious approval of our coming. Summarily, to say why we are here...let me please say that our coming is not influenced by any person, our coming is not sponsored by any person but because in a home where there are fathers, peace is always maintained and because we have observed that there had been some challenges to the people of Rivers State then to the entire Nigeria, we feel agitated in our spirits,” Oruwori said.
“It is not an exaggeration to say that we have been praying but then prayer without faith is classified as dead and it is on this note we have taken upon ourselves to make a move to seek for peace. The scripture says precisely in Matthew 5:9 that ‘Blessed are the peacemakers, for they are the children of God'”.
He added that the group felt that the best action to take was to visit the governor after visiting the wife of the president, to see how they could intervene.
“We just feel that if this matter is allowed to escalate, the matter is something that will not affect only we that are living but even our children that will be born tomorrow,” he submitted.
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The Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ola Olukoyede, has offered whistleblowers between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent of recovered stolen Nigerian assets held abroad for information that leads to their recovery.
Olukoyede disclosed this on Wednesday while delivering a lecture at the Cambridge International Symposium on Economic Crime in the United Kingdom.
According to him, the ability of EFCC operatives to trace assets, cooperation from the judiciary and access to credible intelligence have played important roles in the commission’s success in securing non-conviction-based forfeiture orders.
He also described the EFCC as having some of the best investigators in the world and stressed the importance of protecting and encouraging whistleblowers.
He said anyone with credible information about stolen Nigerian assets taken or hidden anywhere in the world could receive between 2.5 per cent and 5 per cent of the recovered assets as an incentive, with payment made after the recovery.
Olukoyede further revealed that the EFCC had forfeited cash and assets worth more than $500 million to the Federal Government within the past three years.
He cited several cases involving the recovery and forfeiture of assets, including cases linked to a former Chairman of the Central Bank of Nigeria and a former Attorney-General of the Federation.
The EFCC chairman explained that the commission is legally empowered to seek the forfeiture of suspected proceeds of crime by applying to the High Court for an order. He said the process is similar to procedures used in countries such as Australia and Canada.
Olukoyede also recalled a case involving an aircraft allegedly acquired by an individual who was accused of receiving about $30 million in bribes in connection with a power project. He said the aircraft was forfeited about three months ago and had subsequently been added to the presidential air fleet.
He also referred to a property containing about 753 housing units that was forfeited from a former CBN governor, against whom the EFCC has filed criminal charges in three courts.
Speaking about the immediate past Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, Olukoyede said the EFCC opened an investigation following allegations of abuse of office. He claimed that investigators traced about 57 properties to Malami and that approximately 48 of them had been forfeited.
The EFCC chairman further mentioned the forfeiture of a private university allegedly linked to a director in the Federal Ministry of Health. According to him, the official voluntarily surrendered the property following the commission’s investigation.
Olukoyede said the measures demonstrate the importance of asset tracing, international cooperation, credible intelligence and whistleblower protection in the fight against financial crime and the recovery of stolen public assets.
The Dangote Petroleum Refinery has raised concerns over the growing volume of imported petrol entering Nigeria, warning that it could be forced to export more of its own production if the trend continues.
The refinery said imported Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) made up roughly 43 per cent of the petrol supplied to the Nigerian market in July. It argued that the development was creating serious difficulties for a domestic refinery with the capacity to produce enough fuel for the country.
Dangote Refinery explained that it has maintained sizeable petrol reserves since commencing operations to ensure that consumers across Nigeria have access to a reliable supply. Keeping those reserves, it noted, requires substantial expenditure on storage, transportation and working capital.
However, the refinery said the continued granting of import licences without adequate information about expected import volumes has made it increasingly difficult to determine how much petrol should be produced and stored for the local market.
The company said holding large quantities of petrol becomes financially burdensome when there is no certainty about how much imported fuel will compete for the same market. It therefore considers exporting surplus stocks a more commercially viable option than allowing them to remain in storage indefinitely.
According to the refinery, increased exports in recent months should not be interpreted as evidence that Nigeria lacks sufficient refining capacity. Instead, the exports are being driven by excess stock resulting from unpredictable import volumes.
Dangote Refinery maintained that it remains fully committed to supplying the Nigerian market and has the capacity to meet or surpass the country's petrol requirements. It said its decision to export surplus products was aimed at managing inventory efficiently and avoiding unnecessary storage and financing expenses.
The refinery also warned that market disruptions caused by excessive imports could make it harder for domestic refiners to accurately predict demand. Any resulting supply problems, it said, should not automatically be blamed on local refineries.
It urged regulators and other industry stakeholders to improve transparency around petrol imports and strengthen coordination within the downstream petroleum market.
The company argued that policies that give greater support to domestic refining would help Nigeria reduce its dependence on imported fuel, conserve foreign exchange, strengthen energy security and maximise the economic benefits of investments in local refining infrastructure.
Dangote Refinery said it remains prepared to supply the country but stressed that a more predictable and transparent market environment is necessary for efficient production and inventory management.
Business
In The Spotlight
A group of heartless carpetbaggers have captured the Nigerian state, and it appears that they, their biological and political descendants, will hold the levers of government and access to Nigeria’s commonwealth for a long time to come.
When you consider news reports of how previous and current state actors steal public funds, buy choice properties in the toniest districts of Nigeria’s major cities, acquire private jets, and even establish private universities, you wonder if some people have more than two heads, to adopt a Yoruba phrase.
Either because of an inability to deliver the greatest good to the greatest number of Nigerian citizens, or by intention, the political elite have kept the people poor, causing them to depend on the largeness of heart of the same elite to meet their existential needs.
That explains why poor, downtrodden, and unconnected Nigerians eagerly collect crumbs of measly N5,000, rice, gari and whatever else the politicians offer to obtain their election votes or acquiescence after rigging the elections.
When watching an economically disadvantaged individual tell a politician who is seeking to become a legislator the good news that his wife just had a new baby, and he needed to prepare for the naming ceremony, it felt like the oppressed poor were enabling his oppressor to further oppress him.
It was like the classic case of Stockholm syndrome, of victims collaborating with their “captors” to cement the oppressive stranglehold that they already had over the state and the commonwealth of the nation, thus unwittingly arresting their own future development.
A running mate to a former governorship candidate in a Southwestern state hilariously regaled Nigerians with the story of how constituents would have raided all the alcoholic drinks in his refrigerator in the early hours of the morning, even before he woke from the hectic campaign tour of the previous day.
The political elite have practically cornered the Nigerian state for themselves, children, tribesmen and acolytes, and have devised a way to admit only those that they have found to be loyal, or pliable, into their rank of oppressors.
The oppression of the citizens of Nigeria is easily accomplished because of the high illiteracy level amongst the poor masses. The use of the weapon of illiteracy is more evident in Northern Nigeria, whose political leaders somehow turn a blind eye to the illiteracy and underdevelopment of their people.
In 2024, UNICEF revealed that out of Nigeria’s 18.3 million out-of-school children, about 12.1 million, or 66 per cent, were resident in the Northwest and Northeast regions. Yet, instead of expanding educational facilities and opportunities, some Northern governors are arranging mass weddings for children who are hardly out of their teen years.
And this is not to deny the weaponisation of illiteracy even in Obafemi Awolowo’s Western Region, which is regarded as the Athens of Nigeria, after its pre-Independence head start of free, universal and compulsory primary school education.
As if he had a premonition that Nigeria’s so-called democrats would eventually compromise education, to the detriment of the lowest and marginalised masses, that Karl Marx described as the “lumpen proletariat”, French political thinker Montesquieu argued a long time ago that “It is in a republican government that the whole power of education is required.”
Western Nigeria’s free education scheme was gradually abandoned from the days of the Second Republic when some Yoruba members of President Shehu Shagari’s political party knocked it off its bottom with the argument that “qualitative” education was better than “free” education.
It is more than a shame that a free, universal and compulsory primary school education scheme was abandoned under President Shagari, who not only was a trained teacher, but had a career as a teacher before his political career.
Awolowo had warned Nigeria’s political elite with the following quip: “The children of the poor that you failed to educate will not let your children sleep peacefully.” The insecurity that currently occurs in nearly every part of Nigeria only drives Awolowo’s point home.
Probably the realm of the Nigerian republic that has been most complicit with the carpetbagger political elite is the media, whose members either serve the elites as press secretaries who kill media brushfires, or editors who either run planted stories, or spike stories that the politicians do not want published.
The media is so compromised that it can hardly perform those responsibilities assigned to it by Section 22 of the Nigerian Constitution, which are to “be free to uphold the fundamental objectives contained in (Chapter II of the Constitution) and uphold the responsibility and accountability of the Government to the people.”
Some apologists have argued on behalf of the media that the political elite have so run the economy aground that the media, which can only thrive as commercial enterprises within Nigeria’s quasi-capitalist economy, cannot stay afloat, especially with the devastating inroads that the digital media are making into their audience, advertising revenue and profit.
The absence of regional economies, the argument goes, prevents the emergence of regional newspapers that can thrive on advertising revenues from regional companies, the way it obtains in the economies of North America and Western Europe. Many Nigerian newspapers, that are essentially regional, often pretend to be national to receive advertising revenue from companies whose market is national.
Two other collaborators of the political elite are the election management agencies and the judiciary at both the national and sub-national levels of government. The conspiracy between these agencies and the political elite is almost like that of Siamese twins conjoined by the belly button.
After the election management agencies may have deliberately bungled (especially) governorship and legislative house elections, and declared false reports, the losers, who felt that they won the election, would then approach the temple of justice, with significant financial inducement to ask for justice(?).
From that point on, the justice that both contestants hope to corruptly obtain could swing according to the heft of the naira in the Ghana-must-go bag that they will be hauling into the chambers of the denizens of the corrupted judiciary.
Thus, the “award” of electoral justice is “a matter of cash”, to quote Basi, the protagonist of “Basi & Co”, the television sitcom produced by environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who himself was denied justice from the judiciary that served the regime of General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s most notorious military dictator.
In Nigeria, the lines of separation of powers that demarcate the duties of the three arms of government –the legislative, executive and judiciary– and the checks and balances that empower each arm to check the others have become almost irredeemably blurred.
As legislators use constituency projects as a ploy to carry out the functions of the executive, the president issues executive orders that are essentially legislative in nature. Though the judiciary does not perform the duties of the other arms, it fails to check them as it indulgently winks at their excesses.
If those who are regarded as Nigeria’s political elite really know what is in their enlightened self-interest and would like to protect the future of their descendants from what Thomas Hobbes described as a short, brutish and nasty existence, they will use their current privilege to correct the evil they have done to Nigerians.
They must urgently redeem the future before it delivers violence against their children.
By Lekan Sote
In The Spotlight
Lagos alone is worth more than Botswana, Namibia, Rwanda and Mauritius combined.
Let that sink in.
With an economy of N41.17tn — about $102bn in 2021 — Lagos State dwarfed the entire gross domestic products of four countries. Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Delta and Bayelsa sit on oil wealth that funds nations. Ogun, Anambra and Imo churn out goods, services and commerce that would make small economies jealous.
By the numbers, Nigeria’s states are giants.
But walk the streets of Lagos, and you will still find mothers cooking with firewood. Drive through Port Harcourt, and you will see communities drinking water polluted by the same oil that makes the state’s GDP glow. Visit Umuahia, Abeokuta, or Minna and ask the average trader what “trillion-naira economy” means to her dinner table.
The answer is: nothing.
That viral video telling you “10 Nigerian states are richer than countries” is both true and a lie. True, because the 2021 BudgIT figures don’t lie — Lagos at N41.17trn, Rivers at N7.96trn, and so on. A lie, because those numbers are GDP, not prosperity. They measure how much economic activity happens _in_ a place, not how much of it reaches the people who live there.
A country with $7,778 GDP per capita, like Botswana, will still feed its citizens better than a state with $102bn in total output but $2,058 per capita, like Nigeria. A state can host a port, an oil rig, and a tech hub, yet fail to build a hospital that works.
So, the real question isn’t “Which state is bigger than which country?”
The real question, and the one our governors should lose sleep over, is this: When your economy is bigger than a nation, why are your people still living like they have nothing?
In this edition of The Bottomline, we follow the money from GDP to the gutter — and ask why Nigeria’s trillion-naira states have not become trillion-naira lives.
The viral numbers are not new. They were lifted straight from BudgIT’s 2022 State of States report and reflected 2021 estimates: Lagos at N41.17tn, followed by Rivers at N7.96tn, Akwa Ibom at N7.77tn, Imo at N7.68tn, Delta at N6.19tn, Anambra at N5.14tn, Ondo at N5.10tn, Ogun at N5.03tn, Bayelsa at N4.63tn and Niger at N4.58tn.
The trick is in the timing. To pitch those 2021 figures against 2025 country GDPs is statistical fraud. Nigeria has since rebased. The NBS moved the base year from 2010 to 2019, and the whole map shifted. Lagos itself has moved on: its 2025 _Lagos Economic Development Update_ puts the state at N43.06tn in 2023, with forecasts of N54.77tn for 2024 and N66.47tn for 2025. Those are projections, not fresh NBS post-rebasing observations, but they tell you the direction: up.
There is no debate that Lagos is Nigeria’s economic engine. From a colonial port to federal capital until 1991, it never lost momentum. Today, trade, manufacturing, ports, telecoms, tech, entertainment, real estate and finance all cluster in just 3,345 square kilometres. Compare that footprint to Botswana’s 581,730 sq km, Namibia’s 825,615 sq km, Rwanda’s 26,338 sq km, and Mauritius’ 2,040 sq km. Yet in 2021, Lagos’ $102 billion economy was several times larger than Botswana’s $19.9bn, Namibia’s $15.1bn, Rwanda’s $16.4bn, and Mauritius’ $16.2bn, according to 2025 World Bank figures.
That comparison is legitimate. The conclusion people draw from it is not.
GDP tells you how much value was produced in a territory. It does not tell you who owns it, who earns it, or whether the roads work, the lights stay on, or the hospital has drugs.
A state can run a trillion-naira economy and still have mothers boiling water on firewood. A country can have a smaller GDP and deliver a better life. Look at the per capita numbers: Botswana at $7,778, Namibia at $5,309, Mauritius at $11,819. Nigeria sits at about $2,058. Even Rwanda, at just $773 per capita, has pushed its $3-a-day poverty rate down to 38.6 per cent — proof that size is not destiny.
The oil states expose the fraud most brutally. Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Delta and Bayelsa rank high because petroleum inflates their GDP. But oil wealth does not flow into state coffers in equal measure, and it certainly does not flow into household wallets. BudgIT’s own fiscal sustainability index proves this. In 2022, Rivers topped overall fiscal performance despite Lagos having the biggest economy. A big economy without revenue discipline, jobs, and services is just a billboard.
Nigeria does not have a GDP problem. We have a translation problem.
We have pockets of enormous economic power. Lagos. Rivers. Akwa Ibom. Ogun. Anambra. Delta. The output is real. What is missing is the bridge between that output and ordinary life.
Until economic activity creates real jobs, until IGR rises and addiction to federal allocation falls, until infrastructure supports production instead of strangling it, those trillion-naira figures will remain a cruel joke.
So let the video go viral. Let Lagos be “bigger than Botswana”.
But governors, commissioners, and citizens should ask only one question:
If my state can outproduce a country, why can’t it out-deliver a decent life for the people who call it home?
Until we answer that, we are not rich. We are just big.
By Raphael Mbamalu