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Tony Okocha and Rotimi Amaechi
The Tony Okocha-led Caretaker Committee of the All Progressives Congress in Rivers State on Friday disowned the APC candidates vying for the respective local government seats in the state.
The committee spokesman, Chibuike Ikenga, disclosed this in an interview with PUNCH online.
Ikenga reiterated that the candidates were neither given tickets nor known to the National Working Committee of the APC.
According to him, they are loyalists of former Rivers Governor, Rotimi Amaechì, who belong to the camp of the Emeka Beke-led APC faction, whose sack was nullified two months ago by a Rivers State High Court sitting in Port Harcourt.
He said, “For your information, those candidates in Amaechi’s group who claim they are running the election on the ticket of the APC are not members of our party.
“The APC leadership does not recognise them. So who sold the forms to them? Where did they get the forms to go through the primaries and set up the procedure for their emergence?”
The development comes barely three days after the reinstated APC chairman wrote to the Independent National Electoral Commission insisting that the judgment of the Federal High Court cannot stop the Saturday’s local government elections in the state.
Beke, in the letter dated October 1 and addressed to the INEC’s leadership, highlighted that the suit the court relied on to give the orders was filed by Okocha, an ally of the Federal Capital Territory Minister, Nyesom Wike, whom he described as an unknown member of the party.
But Ikenga insisted that Beke and other Amaechi’s loyalists are entitled to their opinions.
“They are just individuals who are entitled to their own opinions. They are not in the party hierarchy. The hierarchy of the party at the national knows the leadership of the party at the state and those are the people we are working with. So Emeka Beke or the pro-Amaechi group are at liberty to join anybody. But they can’t dictate to us how our party should be run.
“There is a subsisting Supreme Court judgment against courts meddling in the internal affairs of a political party. And that is the highest court of the land and that has been their position.
:So anybody can go anywhere and procure court judgment to arm-twist the party. That is exactly what the so-called Amaechi group and Emeka Beke are doing,” he stated.
But the camp of the Beke-led APC exco kicked against the allegation that the LG candidates are outsiders not known to the leadership of the party.
The rebuttal was made by the reinstated Rivers APC Publicity Secretary, Darlington Uwauju, in a phone chat with our correspondent on Friday.
He said, “Which candidates are not known to APC? The only thing I will say to you is that at the last revalidation exercise, even Okocha himself never revalidated his own membership. That’s just my response and let’s leave it at that.”
