APC Called Amaechi a "Loafer" Over His Mother's Medication, and the Condolences Came in the Same Paragraph

Gist time, but first the serious bit: nobody is joking about Mama Amaechi. She died on 16 July at 89, and rest in peace to her. The joke today is the circus around her.

Here's what happened. Rotimi Amaechi, now the ADC vice-presidential candidate, said on television that his mother died because he couldn't afford her medication, and he blamed the Tinubu administration's policies. That's a heavy claim, and the APC chose to answer it with a press release.

Felix Morka's statement is titled "Rotimi Amaechi, You Are a Loafer Outside the Public Office." It opens with a prayer for the repose of Mama Amaechi's soul. Then, in the very next breath, it calls her son "aimless" and "irresponsible," and wonders aloud whether he has "Peter Pan syndrome." That has to be the fastest condolence-to-clapback in Nigerian political history. "May she rest in peace. Now, about her son..."

Then came the line that has people shaking their heads: "The presidency is not a soup kitchen." For a country where every owambe has a rice shortage, that's quite the comparison.

The APC's logic goes like this: Amaechi spent four decades in public office, so he can't possibly struggle. Classic Nigerian reasoning. If you held office, you must be rich. If you say you're struggling, you're lying, or you're a loafer. Apparently there is no third option where medicine is just expensive, and the actual topic, how much drugs cost, quietly left the chat.

The ADC campaign council fired back, and the line making rounds is that the humane response to a grieving son is compassion. Sir, the compassion left the building around paragraph two.

Meanwhile, the real audience is the Nigerian standing in a pharmacy doing arithmetic on a prescription, wondering which tablet to skip. That person isn't voting for "loafer" or "soup kitchen." They're voting for a lower bill.

And we still have about three months of this before January.

Rest in peace, Mama Amaechi. May the rest of us be spared a campaign where grief is a talking point.