President Goodluck Jonathan’s declaration that the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, will take back the five states where the governors recently defected to the All Progressives Congress, APC, in the 2015 general elections has been described as wishful thinking.
President Jonathan had in PDP rallies in Sokoto, Owerri, Lafia and most recently, Minna expressed confidence that the party would regain control of Kano, Sokoto, Kwara, Rivers and Adamawa, which were recently lost to the opposition following protracted crisis in the ruling PDP.
But one of the mentioned state’s governor, Mr. Rotimi Amaechi, who spoke through the Chief of Staff, Government House, Port Harcourt, Chief Tony Okocha, said over 90 per cent of the voting population in Rivers State belonged to the APC.
He explained that those harboring thoughts that PDP would win APC in any election in the state must be hallucinating, adding that the situation on the ground was not favourable to the PDP.
“For anybody to declare that the PDP will take over Rivers in 2015 is mere hallucination. It (PDP winning Rivers in 2015) is not possible. I cannot talk about any other state, but I am sure that APC is in full control of Rivers State.
“You can see that Rivers is an APC state and they can’t take it. More than 90 per cent of the voting population in Rivers State is APC. Apart from being APC members, they are also adherents of APC. So, PDP cannot take the state away from APC”, the governor said.
Speaking in the same vein, the Adamawa State Governor, Murtala Nyako, said unless the president was saying that he had no plans to allow for the conduct of a free and fair elections in 2015, there was no way he (Jonathan) could return to power.
He said there was no way the PDP could win the presidential polls in 2015 if there was a free and fair election because the party had failed woefully in all key indices of governance.
Nyako, who spoke through his Director of Press and Public Affairs, Ahmad Sajoh, advised President Jonathan and the leadership of the PDP to look inwards for the cause of the nation’s woes because they were directly responsible for most of what was wrong in the polity.
He said “Our advice to him and his party, is to look inwards and see what is going wrong around him. He is junketing and visiting traditional rulers in places where nothing is happening, he has forgot to visit places where people are being killed daily, where innocent people are being slaughtered.
“He has a responsibility to the people of this country not to contest for the Presidency in 2015 but to provide leadership for Nigerians between now and 2015.
“He has to secure the lives and property of Nigerians between now and then to ensure free and fair elections and ensure confidence in the democracy. These are the challenges before him; this is much more than his desperation to return to power in 2015”.
