By Mallam Abdulhakeem Lawal
Rotimi Amaechi’s legacy is visible, tangible, and historic. Oshiomhole’s is a ghost story whispered, unsubstantiated, and sometimes not quickly forgotten like the Shoprite Billboard.
Adams Oshiomhole’s recent appearance on Channels Television was a masterclass in political amnesia and bitter jealousy. What Nigerians heard was not the insightful commentary of a respected statesman, but the desperate grumblings of a man whose own record in public service is a cavernous void where legacy should reside. If he possessed even a shred of shame, he would have chosen the dignity of silence. Instead, he offered noise, forcing us to hold up the mirror to his own catastrophic failures.
Let us be unequivocal: while Oshiomhole trades in empty rhetoric, Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi builds legacies that endure.
As Governor of Rivers State, Amaechi did not merely hold office; he unleashed a renaissance. He engineered Nigeria’s first integrated security network, slashing kidnapping and violent crime to levels previously thought impossible. He did not just talk about education; he constructed over 500 modern, state-of-the-art schools and put 13,000 teachers to work. He did not pay lip service to healthcare; he transformed a skeletal system of fewer than 200 professionals into a robust workforce of over 1,500 doctors, nurses, and specialists. He fortified the Rivers State University and launched agricultural enterprises like Songhai Farms, delivering sustainable development, not the phantom projects Oshiomhole specializes in.
As Minister of Transportation, Amaechi delivered what countless administrations before him could not: moving, operational, standard-gauge rail lines. The Abuja-Kaduna, Lagos-Ibadan, and Warri-Itakpe lines are not PowerPoint presentations; they are systems Nigerians use daily. He aggressively advanced other critical lines and, with the Deep Blue Project, achieved the monumental feat of having Nigeria removed from the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy blacklist after two decades. This is the mark of a visionary – a man who gets things done.
Now, let us examine the “Oshiomhole Legacy.” It is a chronicle of broken promises and breathtaking hypocrisy.
As Governor of Edo State, he promised 10,000 jobs, delivered a paltry fraction, and then cruelly dismissed those few without benefits. He unleashed a regime of 24 different taxes, strangling local businesses, while handing revenue collection to motor park touts. His administration was a spectacle of financial recklessness and grand deception.
Remember the ₦30 billion stormwater project, funded from the Ecological Fund? A colossal drainpipe for public funds. Remember the “specialist hospital,” staged with borrowed equipment for a television crew? A monument to fraud. Under his watch, Edo State’s debt ballooned to over ₦45 billion domestically and $180 million externally, with nothing to show for it but a trail of misery.
His governance was a toxic brew of vindictiveness and impunity: contracts awarded without due process, private properties demolished for political revenge, and a brazen attempt to privatize the University in Iyamo for his own benefit, a scheme only halted when his successor, Godwin Obaseki, exposed him.
And while thousands of Edo pensioners were left to starve, abandoned by the state they served, Oshiomhole miraculously found the resources to erect a multi-billion naira palatial mansion in Iyamo. Communities around GRA in Benin City still wonder how public land meant for their benefit silently transformed into private estates tied to his personal interests. The evidence of his tenure is not in public infrastructure, but in private aggrandizement.
On the judiciary, Oshiomhole has the audacity to point fingers? The crisis in the Rivers State judiciary was a legal, internal dispute, managed by Amaechi within strict constitutional bounds. Oshiomhole should instead explain how his party, the APC, committed a grave constitutional crime by imposing a retired military administrator as “Sole Administrator” of Rivers State; an act of sheer impunity no president is empowered to perform. Today, under his party’s influence, the judiciary has been so captured that judges now sing partisan songs at official conferences. This is not democracy; it is a disgrace, and Oshiomhole is its cheerleader.
Amaechi’s legitimacy is unassailable. He won his primaries democratically with 6,527 votes out of 6,575, and the Supreme Court rightly affirmed the will of the people. He is the only Nigerian to have successfully managed two presidential campaigns, toppling an incumbent in 2015 and securing a re-election in 2019. That is strategic prowess.
Amaechi’s legacy is visible, tangible, and historic. Oshiomhole’s is a ghost story whispered, unsubstantiated, and sometimes not quickly forgotten like the Shoprite Billboard.
Until Adams Oshiomhole can point to a single institution he built that still stands strong, a single policy that reformed society, or a single project that wasn’t a scam, he should retreat to the silence his record so richly deserves. He may criticize from the sidelines, but he can never discredit the giant whose shadow he so pathetically envies.
Mallam Abdulhakeem Lawal
Spokesperson, CRA ’27 Advocacy Network
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