Founding member of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Osita Okechukwu, has demanded apology from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), for overheating the polity.
Addressing newsmen in Abuja on Sunday, on the political rumblings, the Rivers State imbroglio, and dangerous slide into one party state; Okechukwu accused PDP of being responsible, demanding apologise from the opposition party to Nigerians for the harm’s way they railroaded the democracy.
Okechukwu further claimed that it’s high time PDP came down from their high horse and apologise profusely to Nigerians for unintended consequences of their impunity, to the good people of Rivers State instead of playing blame games.
Dismissing the exoneration of the PDP from Rivers State’s imbroglio, and heaping the blame on Mr President for not calling his Minister, Nyesom Wike to order, Okechukwu rejected the claims.
“We should beware of retrograde amnesia; as we cannot easily forget how the PDP leadership in 2023 presidential primary sowed the seeds of discord and stoked the raging inferno by violently breaching the rotation convention of north to south and vice versa,” he retorted.
The former Managing Director of News Agency of Nigeria added: “the day we tame the culture of impunity, the day we progress, therefore if PDP had considered our fledgling democracy or even obeyed Section 7 of their constitution, there couldn’t have been Wike Masquerade.”
On the speculations that APC is capitalising on the discord in the PDP to drive Nigerians into one party state, he argued that it is those elements who jettisoned with wave of hand the rotation convention, the ligament holding the north and the south together that are the drivers of one party state.
“Otherwise Nigeria operates multiparty system by law, it is only the fire stoked by PDP that is raging. They erroneously misunderstood the sophisticated northern electorates, assumed they were in dormitory to be hauled to polling stations on election day to vote for northern candidate.
“These are illiberal elements fast eroding our multi-party system. They are at it again to stop rotation convention with an awkward presidency arithmetic of 17 years south and 11 years north by 2027, as if Nigeria got independence in 1999,” Okechukwu submitted.
Okechukwu also submitted that if PDP had adhered to rule of law and subsisting rotation convention, maybe Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi and Rabiu Kwankwaso’s votes could have been theirs in 2023 presidential election.
