By Okoi Obono-Obla
It is plain revisionism of the highest magnitude for Rt. Honourable Rotimi Amaechi to have claimed: “When we decided to form the APC, while I was a minister, President Tinubu was claiming he made Buhari president, and I couldn’t respond because I was the minister under President Buhari,” in an interview with AriseTV on Friday.
As the National Deputy Secretary of the defunct Congress for Progressives Change (CPC), Secretary of the CPC Merger Committee, and Co-Secretary of the Joint Inter-Party Merger Committee (an umbrella committee made up of the merger committees of the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria, ACN; the All Nigerian Peoples Party, ANPP; the CPC; and factions of the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA, and the Democratic Peoples Party, DPP, that negotiated the formation of the All Progressives Congress from January to July 2013), I can state without fear of contradiction that Rt. Honourable Rotimi Amaechi was not among those who founded the APC in 2013.
The political association known as APC was registered as a political party on 31 July 2013. The negotiations and discussions that eventually led to the merger began as far back as 2008 between late President Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu. At all material times, Rt. Honourable Rotimi Amaechi was the Governor of Rivers State until May 29, 2015.
It was only in May 2014 that the New PDP (a faction that splintered from the PDP), comprising Rt. Honourable Rotimi Amaechi, Dr. Bukola Saraki, Dr. Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, Alhaji Abdulfatah Abdulrazak (then Governor of Kwara State), Rt. Honourable Aminu Tambuwal, and others, defected from the PDP to join the APC. While it is true that Amaechi later became the Director-General of the Buhari Presidential Campaign Council, his claim to have contributed more to President Muhammadu Buhari’s electoral victory than Asiwaju Tinubu is inconsistent with the historical record. By the time Amaechi joined the APC in May 2014, much of the groundwork that significantly contributed to Buhari’s eventual success had already been laid.
In conclusion, Amaechi’s role in Buhari’s campaign was notable, but the assertion that he was a founding figure of the APC or that his contributions outweighed those of Tinubu does not align with the documented history of the merger and formation of the party. Historical accuracy demands that such claims be properly contextualized to avoid misleading narratives
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