By Florence Uwaeme
Rivers State Chapter of the All Progressives Congress, APC said it has not ceded the Ministerial slot of the state to the immediate past Governor, Mr Nyesom Wike.
The state chapter of the party in a statement on Wednesday by its publicity secretary, Darlington Nwauju, said it has never interacted with Amalgamated Bola Tinubu Campaign Council since it has more than a hundred NGOs and support groups who worked for it in the State.
However, it said that for clarity, no NGO or individual outside the officially recognized party structure has the authority of the state chapter of the party to award any entitlements to the former Governor who is a card-carrying member of the PDP.
“We wonder where the group or individual derived its powers to speak for APC from, however, for the umpteenth time, we want to say that Mr. Tony Okocha is not a member of our great party and we have not received any communication from the national secretariat of our party that he has been granted waivers to join our party. So, we want to officially dispel that sponsored rumor targeted to package the political ambition of former Governor Wike.
“We, therefore reject this obvious public ridicule and assault on our sensibilities as a political party.
“Now to address the major issue raised in the said publication which shamelessly attempted to tie Rivers State APC to their unexplainable plot to dash the rights of APC Rivers to a non-member, our response goes thus: Assuming without conceding that Mr. Wike passed through some back channels to fund the Presidential campaigns in Rivers which the state chapter cannot even account for, does his Greek gift now qualify him to be rewarded with a Ministerial slot for
“(a) sponsoring 12 different court actions to stop Rivers APC from fielding candidates for the 2023 elections;
“(b) sealing party offices of his opponents, encouraging his loyalists to invade campaign venues and leaving humongous destruction in the trail, denying parties access to state-owned facilities for campaigns, introducing anti-democratic rules beyond the ones set by the INEC??
“The most dangerous state to raise an APC flag or campaign since 2014 till date is Rivers State. What then would this party say to hundreds of our party faithful whose freedom and rights were infringed upon through illegal detentions, bodily harm, and even outright killing?
“If we had all died and the party non-existent in the state, which APC would former Governor Wike have dreamt of benefitting from?
“We cannot reduce our progressive party platform to an arena where merchandising on betrayals, lies, and blackmail becomes the only currency for political survival. We have no record of any group as Amalgamated Bola Tinubu Campaign Council in our party in Rivers State, we have a total of 76 registered NGOs and support groups that supported APC in Rivers State.
“The most fantastically audacious of lies we have heard in the past weeks is for an individual who is NOT a member of our party at any level to be running around media houses to claim Rivers APC has a new leadership or party stakeholders have ceded the states’ Ministerial slot etc etc
“An apropos idiom for us to use here is to say that one cannot cut his nose to spite his face. Mr. President is way too experienced to fall for the disingenuous idea of cutting his nose to spite his face. To suggest that the President hands the Ministerial slot meant for Rivers State to a PDP ex-Governor is to ask the President to destroy his party. Incontrovertibly, the APC remains the base of Mr President and Rivers APC worked hard by campaigning to win all the elections.
“The burden is on President Tinubu to uphold the principle of party loyalty and supremacy for the fact that there is an official party structure in Rivers State”
