Amaechi made the allegation on Friday during an interview on Channels Television’s Politics Today, connecting what he described as personal loss to a national pattern of healthcare inaccessibility driven by policy decisions at the federal level.
“Before Tinubu, my mother was healthy,” he said. “Suddenly, by the time Tinubu came, it was difficult to buy drugs for my mother. I know most of you won’t believe this.”
The former minister, who is now the vice-presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress, told the program that the hardship he experienced was not unique. Millions of Nigerian families, he argued, were facing the same impossible calculation between survival and the cost of medicine, a reality he said he witnessed firsthand in the final months of his mother’s life.
“Because policies are killing people,” Amaechi said during the interview. “I’ve lost my mother. You want me to mention my friends who are 90 or 92 years old? Why do you think my mother couldn’t live up to 92? Tinubu was the reason.”
Nigeria spent N200 billion importing drugs last quarter, according to figures Amaechi cited from the National Bureau of Statistics. That number carries weight in a country where forty percent of finished goods, by the same data, are imported rather than produced locally.
The implication Amaechi drew was direct. When the naira loses value and import costs rise, the price of medicine rises with it. The people who cannot absorb that increase are not abstractions. They are elderly parents in households where the income did not change when the prices did.
Tinubu’s removal of the petrol subsidy in May 2023 triggered a cascade of cost increases across the Nigerian economy. Transport, food, and manufactured goods all became more expensive in the months that followed, with the naira subsequently losing more than half its official value against the dollar by early 2024, and Amaechi, confirmed by his public statements since then, has consistently placed himself among the critics of those specific decisions.
Speaking on Channels Television, Amaechi, who served as minister under former President Muhammadu Buhari, did not limit his argument to one household. The point, he said, extended to “so many persons whose parents have died who themselves are about to die” because medicines had become unaffordable.
That framing resets the story from a personal grievance to a policy indictment. What Amaechi offered on Friday was not a eulogy. It was a political charge using personal loss as evidence.
The drug import bill of N200 billion that Amaechi referenced speaks to a structural dependency that predates the current administration. Nigeria has long relied on imported pharmaceuticals because domestic manufacturing capacity remains limited. What changed under Tinubu, critics argue, is that devaluation made the import burden catastrophic for end consumers, pushing the retail price of common medications beyond the reach of pensioners and low-income households.
Forty percent of finished goods imported means four out of every ten items bought in a Nigerian market originated elsewhere. For drugs specifically, that figure likely runs higher, according to industry estimates that have circulated in health policy discussions.
Amaechi’s ADC ticket positions him as an opposition voice ahead of future electoral cycles. His decision to frame Tinubu’s economic record through the death of his mother is a calculation as much as it is a confession. Grief and politics, in this instance, are not separate.
No response had emerged from the presidency by the time this report was filed. The Channels Television interview aired Friday, with Amaechi’s remarks on Tinubu’s policies and their human cost drawing immediate public attention on Saturday.
The claim that Tinubu’s policies contributed to his mother’s death remains, at this point, what Rotimi Amaechi said. What it costs ordinary Nigerians to stay alive on medication is a figure the NBS has already put on record.
