2023: Umahi Will Be A Disaster If Elected President – Former Aide

Abia Onyike, former Ebonyi State Commissioner of Information, has said that his ex-principal Governor Dave Umahi will be a disaster if he is elected Nigeria’s president.

Onyike, the former director of Umahi’s ‘Divine Mandate Campaign’ in the 2015 elections, also alleged that the governor who was recently sacked by a Federal High Court in Abuja, is too ‘self willed.’

He said, “Umahi will be a disaster when he becomes president… We must understand that the society is governed by law and that is why we have bureaucracy,” he said on Thursday during an interview on Arise TV.

“Dave Umahi does not believe in such things. For instance the first thing he did when he became the governor of Ebonyi State was to behead the Civil Service. No permanent secretaries were appointed, he worked alone controlling the ministries directly with his commissioners for the four years of his first tenure.

“He fails to take advice from anybody, so coming to talk about the presidency, I don’t know how he will get about it. Ebonyi State is a very small state. And we have to tell ourselves the truth. If you cannot run a state as small as Ebonyi, you are not paying the standard salary.

“A director in Ebonyi state receives N100, 000. [Umahi] divided the working class and made sure that the trade unions and the house unions were devastated and did not have nobody talking for them.

“If that is what is possible, then maybe when he becomes the president, he will not appoint permanent secretaries.”

Umahi defected from the Peoples Democratic Party to the ruling All Progressive Congress in November 2020.

He had won the governorship seat in 2015 under the PDP and won the bid to extend his stay in office in the 2019 general elections.

The ex-commissioner said Umahi never believed that he would be sacked from his role as governor.

Onyike said, “He has been behaving like the owner of Nigeria. This very man when he was still in PDP one day told us that he is both in the PDP and in the APC and that he is the only person that can belong to two political parties at a time and that any person who ever tries to emulate him will get into trouble.

“Somebody must have the ability to be a team player to listen to other opinions except you will have him transform to a military dictator. Otherwise, I don’t see him playing within the democratic tenets.”

“His regime has been very very strange and it has been like a thunder bolt that hit the people of Ebonyi State. Extremely regrettable.”