A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Osita Okechukwu, has said that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is overheating the polity over the declaration of emergency rule in Rivers by President Bola Tinubu .
Okechukwu said the PDP was responsible for the political rumblings, and imbroglio in Rivers State.
In a statement on Sunday, the former director general of the Voice of Nigeria (VON), said it was high time the PDP came down from its high horse and apologise to Nigerians for the unintended consequences of their impunity..
Okechukwu noted that “we should beware of retrograde amnesia; as we cannot easily forget how the PDP leadership in the 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.
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“The day, we tame the culture of impunity, is the day we progress. Therefore, if the PDP had considered our fledgling democracy or even obeyed Section 7 of their constitution, there couldn’t have been the Wike masquerade.”
On whether APC is capitalising on the discord in the PDP to drive Nigerians into one party state, Okechukwu said that it is those elements who jettisoned the rotation convention, the ligament holding the north and the south together, that are the drivers of a one party state.
He said: “Otherwise Nigeria operates a multi-party system by law, it is only the fire stoked by PDP that is raging.
“They erroneously misunderstood the sophisticated northern electorate, assumed they were in dormitory to be hauled to polling stations on election day to vote for a northern candidate.
“These are the elements fast eroding our multi-party system. They’re 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.”
Finally Okechukwu submitted that if PDP had adhered to the rule of law, and subsisting rotation convention, maybe the votes recorded by Atiku, Obi and Kwankwaso could have been theirs in the 2023 presidential election.
