Governor Wike was chairman of the PDP National Convention Planning Committee, which took place in Port Harcourt, Rivers State but was inconclusive as new national officers of the party could not be elected due to court orders.
Reacting to the outcome of the highly-publicized event, the Rivers APC Chairman, Dr. Davies Ikanya, in a statement issued on Tuesday in Port Harcourt, described the outcome of the national convention as “disastrous” and a signal that the end of the “once greatest political party in Africa is not far from sight”.
The statement reads: “As much as we sympathise with the endangered party of the torn umbrella, we hereby unreservedly condemn Chief Nyesom Wike for wasting a whopping sum of N10 billion belonging to the good people of Rivers State on this charade, especially in these lean times. This is not only condemnable but also abhorrent and unacceptable to the good people of Rivers State. We therefore request Chief Wike and his cotravellers to account for and return this huge sum to the Rivers State treasury as we cannot continue to fold our hands and watch him mortgage the future of Rivers State through his shocking financial recklessness”.
Mr. Ikanya also lampooned PDP leaders who turned up for the ill-fated convention, saying that they should have known better.
“Those PDP leaders who gathered in Port Harcourt to waste the scarce resources of Rivers State are as guilty as their host, Chief Wike. For crying out loud, they should have known that the so called National Convention would be a charade in view of the court order barring any such exercise and with the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) stating from the very beginning that it would neither participate nor recognise the outcome of the purported convention”, he said.
The Rivers APC also sympathised with the sacked PDP Acting National Chairman, Ali Modu Sheriff, saying he was lured with a fake promise that he would be supported to contest and win election during the convention as the party’s substantive chairman.
Mr. Sheriff, it would be recalled, canceled the national convention citing respect for court injunctions but it was a face-saving measure after indications emerged that the party’s governors, on whose back he rode to office as acting national chairman in the first place, were going to sack him from office.
The statement, however, wondered how Sheriff, despite his wealth of political experience, could fall prey of the treacherous acts of Wike, who it claimed together with out-voted former president, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, destroyed PDP when they ensured that Rt. Hon. Chibuike Amaechi and other party pillars were forced out of the party, thus inadvertently laying the foundation for the PDP’s loss of power in the last general elections.
“We wonder why Sheriff is crying that he was betrayed at Port Harcourt”, Rivers APC said, adding: “If we may ask, does a leopard change its spots? If Wike could betray and ridicule Amaechi, who did everything humanly possible to make him Obio-Akpor Local Government Chairman, his Chief of Staff and nominated him as a Minister of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, then we wonder why Sheriff or any other PDP leader should trust him not to betray them”.
