Amaechi had problem with Patience, not me —Jonathan

Former President Goodluck Jonathan has said there is no bone of contention between him and the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaehi.

Rather, Jonathan stated that Amaechi had a problem with his wife, Patience, which he (Jonathan) tried in vain to resolve.

Jonathan’s disclosed this in a book titled, ‘Against the Run of Play,’ written by the Chairman, Editorial Board of ThisDay, Olusegun Adeniyi.

“Jonathan told me that Amaechi’s problem was not with him but rather with his wife and that, at a point, he tried to reconcile them,” the book stated.

While Amaechi admitted that he was at loggerheads with Patience, he said Jonathan was not saying the whole truth, noting that there were also disagreements between him and Jonathan, during the latter’s era as the President.

The ex-Rivers State governor attributed the cause of his grudge with Jonathan to illegal and excess deduction from the federation account by the former president.

He said, “I could not surrender my mandate to a woman (Patience) in Abuja, even if such a person was the wife of the President…that basically was my sin with Dame Patience Jonathan.

“If in one year, you took about N300bn from the federation account to pay for subsidy and the next year, you are taking almost N2tn for the same thing when fundamentals had not changed, then serious questions should be asked.

“And as NGF (Nigerian Governors Forum) chairman, it was my responsibility to ask those questions and Jonathan took them personal.”

In the book, the Borno State Governor, Kashim Shettima, lamented that Jonathan was not committed to the efforts to fight Boko Haram insurgency in the North-East.

Shettima said out of the 13 meetings he had with Jonathan on the Boko Haram terrorism, only one was initiated by the latter.

“All the others were at my seeking appointments to see him and on some occasions, it took several weeks for such requests to be granted. There was a belief around President Jonathan that the whole Boko Haram crisis was orchestrated to undermine him and his administration and because of that, there was no interest in resolving the problem,” he added.

The governor alleged that Jonathan ‘marked’ him for pushing for the meetings and allegedly planned to remove him and the two other governors in the North-East.

Shettima said, “He particularly wanted to remove me….I heard that his Attorney-General and Justice Minister, Mr. Mohammed Adoke, said there was nowhere in the constitution where the President had the power to remove a governor. In fact, I was told that President Jonathan reportedly interjected by asking, ‘How come President Obasanjo removed Governor Joshua Dariye?’ to which he was reminded that the Dariye aberration had been declared illegal by the Supreme Court.”