Wike’s Comments On Odili Were Wrong – Senator Lee Maeba

Senator Lee Maeba has condemned Nyesom Wike’s attacks on former Governor Peter Odili during Christmas.

Senator Maeba said Wike lied against a man whom he had always called a father to achieve political interest.

In an interview with Arise TV on Thursday, the former Senator for Rivers South East condemned the narrative that former Governor Wike built a house for Odili.

Maeba explained that Wike appealed to Odili before he left the house he had lived in for 30 years to pack into the new house.

“We have to find a way to usher in decorum, because on Sunday, last Sunday, I think that was about the 29th or so of December, we saw the former governor in a church, in a church saying so many unprintable things against Governor Odili, who is old enough to be his father, who he has always called his father.

“I don’t see, we don’t see the politics of only being lawyer when you are, when you are expecting a position or being lawyer when it is expedient for you to be lawyer. It is excessive for the former governor, for the minister of the FCT, for a holder of the national honor of the commander of the order of the Niger, to have gone too low, below patriotism. Taking on the state, taking on Odili and calling names, a lot of the things he put in that comment in the church were very, very wrong,” he said.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chieftain called on the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) and Pentcostal Fellowship of Nigeria (PFN) to advise churches against allowing politicians to use their altars and pulpits to settle political issues.

“I also call on the Christian Association of Nigeria and the PFN, push on some churches, you tell them to allow your altar, your pulpit to be used for political settlement. It’s very wrong. The church would have stopped him.

“In very normal society, when the church is the church, they will stop him. Look, this is the church. We are not here to settle political scores. So many of the things he said in the church were very wrong, that he built a mansion for Odili. No, Odili has lived in the house. All of us have always been with him since the Constituent Assembly as a practicing medical professional, till he became deputy governor, till he became governor,” he stated.

Speaking on why Odili left his house to the house the FCT Minister built when he was governor, Senator Maeba explained that Wike only implemented the state’s Governors’ Pension Act.

Maeba continued, “He has always lived in that house for so many years. So if a man could have been a governor for eight years, the former governor also said that after being eight years of a governor, what is he still looking for? He’s not looking for money. He’s very contented.

“When the effort to bring him out of that house to what he called the mansion, he rejected it. He said, look, he’s 70 something years old already. He doesn’t need to go and live in the mansion. This house he is staying for over 30 years. And so the pressure for him to move was like, was it a bet or like a trick to trick him to a house so that you can use it later and say you built a house for him?

“That is the state law and the Governor’s Pension Act was what Wike himself did while he was in office. That a former governor, they build a house for him in Port Harcourt, they build a house for him in Abuja, they build a house, they do all those stuff, they put it together. Odili did not do any pension act to enrich himself as a left office in 2007. So this is a man who is self-contented.”