By Eshioromeh Sebastian
While I was still processing a confession made by Rotimi Amaechi, the vice-presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, about how he technically resigned from the late President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration before its end, the former Minister scored another own goal.
The former Rivers State Governor said on Channels Television’s Politics Today that he lost his 89-year-old mother to the harsh economic policies of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu. According to him, his mother was healthy before Tinubu assumed office, but he later struggled to afford the drugs she needed. He said the removal of the fuel subsidy was supposed to improve Nigerians’ living conditions but had instead worsened their hardship. “The policies Tinubu introduced are killing people. I lost my mother because of the policies. We have lost people. President Tinubu’s policies killed my mother,” he said. “Before Tinubu became President, my mother was healthy. Suddenly, when Tinubu came, it became difficult to buy drugs for my mother. I did the best I could in taking care of my mother.”
A woman died at 89. Her son is a former Speaker of one of the richest states in Nigeria, a former governor, a former minister, a man of considerable means. Whatever else is true, that burial belonged to the family alone. Nothing about it should be weaponised for political gain. Yet, Amaechi did. He tied it to subsidy removal. He blamed Tinubu, and turned a family loss into a public charge. In doing so, he opened the door to questions he may not have anticipated.
At 89, death is the natural end of a long life. Amaechi knows this. He is not a man unacquainted with the realities of ageing. Yet he chose to frame his mother’s death as evidence of Tinubu’s failure, because that framing serves a purpose. It positions him as a victim of the same hardship he claims ordinary Nigerians face.
The confession that preceded this one is worth revisiting. Amaechi said he technically resigned from Buhari’s government long before his formal resignation in May 2022. He said he confronted Buhari privately, asking whether the government was meeting the expectations of those who voted for it. Buhari reportedly responded that the circumstances were different. Dissatisfied, Amaechi returned the next day and asked for permission to go to university. Buhari said yes.
His application stated he would not be in the office Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. He would come only on Wednesdays. “That is technically resigning from government,” Amaechi said. “The only day I came to the office was Wednesdays.”
This is a remarkable thing to say about oneself. Amaechi is telling us that for a significant portion of his tenure as Minister of Transportation, he was absent from his own office four days a week, drawing a minister’s salary and enjoying a minister’s privileges while showing up one day a week. If this is true, it is a confession of dereliction. If it is false, it is a lie told about a dead president who cannot correct him.
Either way, Amaechi loses. The man who now attacks Buhari’s government spent seven years in it, praised it when it suited him, and now, with Buhari in the grave, tells the world he had checked out long before the end. The dead cannot speak. Amaechi knows this. It is why he speaks.
His remarks about Buhari are a window into something larger: his relationship with public funds and public trust.
In May 2025, Rotimi Amaechi turned 60. The celebration was not modest. It began with a public lecture at the Ladi Kwali Hall in the Continental Hotel, Abuja, on a theme that now reads like a cruel joke: “Weaponisation of Poverty as a Means of Underdevelopment: A Case Study of Nigeria.” The next day, there was a gala at the Transcorp Hilton. The hall alone reportedly cost N30 million to rent. The entire celebration, according to those who tracked the event, exceeded N200 million.
A man who could not buy drugs for his mother spent over N200 million on a birthday party. The same arithmetic applies to his other expenditures under the Tinubu administration he now blames for his mother’s death.
When Amaechi contested the APC presidential primary in 2022, he paid N100 million for the nomination form. It was a demonstration of financial capacity, and he paid it without visible difficulty. That was under the Buhari administration, but the point holds: this is not a man unaccustomed to writing large cheques when his ambition requires it.
His daughter graduated from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom. Tuition for an international student there runs into tens of thousands of pounds, with living expenses to match. Amaechi paid all of it under the Tinubu administration, by his own timeline. The naira was not stronger then. The economy was not kinder. Yet the school fees were paid.
Amaechi’s estimated net worth is over $750 million. He is routinely listed among the fifteen richest politicians in Nigeria. He owns properties, businesses, and investments that most Nigerians cannot imagine. This is not a man who checks the price of bread before buying it.
So when he says he could not afford drugs for his mother, the question is not whether the economy was difficult. The economy is difficult for everyone. The question is how a man with $750 million in estimated wealth, who spent N200 million on a birthday party, paid N100 million for a nomination form, and funded a British university education for his daughter, could not find the money for his mother’s medication.
Amaechi has spent his entire adult life in public office. He was Speaker of the Rivers State House of Assembly. He was Governor of Rivers State for eight years. He was Minister of Transportation for seven years. He was Director-General of the Buhari campaign in 2015 and 2019. His political career has been sustained by public funds. Now, out of office, he has discovered a new strategy: attack the sitting president, wrap himself in the suffering of the people, and use his dead mother as evidence of his connection to their pain.
His record does not support his claim. It supports a different conclusion: that Rotimi Amaechi, like many Nigerian politicians, cannot survive outside public funds.
He is not a poor man. He has never been one. But there is a difference between having money and having access to money that is not yours. In office, he spent public funds. Out of office, he must spend his own. He lives on his investments, and his investments do not flow as freely as government accounts once did. That is the pain he is describing. Not the price of drugs, but the loss of access.
This is why he chose to attack Tinubu through his mother’s death. The old woman did not die of Tinubu’s policies. She died at 89, which is what happens when a life has run its course. What died under Tinubu’s policies, if we are to believe her son, is access to free public funds Amaechi doesn’t have again.
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