Governor Rochas Okorocha of Imo State will soon unveil his new cabinet members as he focuses on those to work with him ahead of the 2019 general election.
The new cabinet may have as many as 100 members.
The governor last week sacked all his commissioners, special advisers and special assistants, a move that took all the affected political appointees by surprise.
Sources close to the Imo State government house told Armadanews.com that rather than the claim that Okorocha will reconstitute a lean cabinet, the governor is rather planning to increase the number of his aides as he does not intend to take chances with the coming election in 2019.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had already indicated that elections would be held early in 2019 with the time table it released few months ago.
On their own, politicians have also started working in line with the announcement INEC made regarding the poll, engaging themselves in one form of political alignment or realignment or the other.
When Okorocha sacked his cabinet, many had thought he will reconstitute a lean staff in view of the cash cruch that has gripped the state for some time now which even makes payment of salaries of civil servants and the pensions and gratuities of pensioners difficult.
Sources told this newspaper during the week that Okorocha has not only identified some of the aides who served in the sacked cabinet as potential raw materials for the 2019 election to retain, but intends to add more people to the number of cabinet he sacked originally.
According to our source, how to win the election and remain politically relevant is what matters to the governor more than any other thing else and he would stop at nothing to assembly men and women who will be ready to do battle with him for 2019.
Preparatory to unveiling the faces of his new cabinet members, Okorocha has been working to dispel newspaper report that his administration has not performed.
His chief press secreatry, Sam Onwuemedo in a statement on Monday, June 5 blamed the said negative newspaper report on Okorocha’s political traducers, noting that the report was nothing short of a paid and hatchet job to discredit his administration.
But we got it on good authority that the governor is prepared to do battle in 2019 and hopes that any commissioner, special adviser or special assistant who makes the list of his new cabinet should be ready to do battle with him as well.
There is already a crack in Okorocha’s party, the All Progressive Congress (APC), with key members of the party knocking the governor up and down of late beacuse of his intension to impose a candidate on the party and the state without regard to the zoning arrangement that he met on ground in Imo, called Imo Equity Charter.
Okorocha does not believe that formula exists and has gone as far as enlisting the support of some of his stooges across the three senatorial districts that make up Imo to kick against the zoning arrangement.