Chapters of the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Progressives Congress in Rivers State on Tuesday were at each other’s throats over alleged attacks on party members and supporters.
While the APC said the PDP was responsible for the death of over 30 of its members and supporters, the latter said the allegation was ridiculous and untrue.
The APC governorship candidate in the state, Dr. Peterside Dakuku, had raised the alarm on Monday that the lives of his party members were no longer safe in Rivers as a result of politically-motivated violence.
But the Chairman, Media and Publicity, PDP Campaign Organisation, Mr. Emma Okah, said in a telephone interview on Tuesday that it was wrong for the APC to claim that it lost 30 persons to political violence in the state.
Okah, who is a former Commissioner for Information in the state, said that some of the victims had died as a result of cult activities and communal clashes, adding that the APC was trivialising death by linking such deaths to political violence.
He said, “People who are aggrieved cannot ventilate their anger through due processes. Occasionally, you have cult-related activities; we have conflicts that could have been resolved ordinarily through litigations being resolved by the resort to jungle justice or by people taking laws into their hands.
“It is not in the character of the PDP to resort to violence. The PDP has never even done that to anybody. We challenge them to show evidence. It is not enough that you are showing pictures of dead bodies and all that. I am saying that if today, you kill a PDP person for an instance, the PDP would take steps to alert the police and it is left for the police to investigate.
“Why is APC insisting that the PDP is responsible for the death of its (APC) members? So, what the APC is saying is that wherever a death occurs and that death is a violent death that touches any APC person, it means that the persons behind it are PDP persons. It doesn’t follow.”
Okah, however, recalled how a staunch PDP member in the state was nearly assassinated, saying that the party merely called the police to investigate the incident and did not accuse the APC.
Chairman of the APC in the state, Dr. Davies Ikanya, disagreed with Okah’s argument, insisting that the PDP masterminded the violence against APC members in the state.
Ikanya, who spoke through his Senior Special Assistant on Media, Chief Chukwuemeka Eze, said the characters in the PDP were predisposed to violence and that contrary to PDP’s claim, the APC would never be involved in attacking its members and supporters.
He said, “All the characters in the PDP in Rivers State are prone to violence. Go through their records. Remember we belonged to one political family before. So, you can see a division now. We have the violent type and the one that is not violent.
“Those that are not violent have since moved to the APC. Everything about the PDP is violence, even at the national level. We have listed about 150 sins of the PDP and all of them are attacks, attacks and attacks.
“They have gone to kidnap our member and they disrupted the rally both in the Khana and Okrika Local Government Areas. If the PDP is denying all these, is it the APC that would be disrupting its own rallies with violence?”
The APC chairman, however, observed that suspect had been arrested by the police in connection with the violence against members of his party, even as he promised that the APC would continue to comply with the peace accord subscribed to by members of political parties in the state.
“Since all these happened, not even one person has been arrested. Upon all these attacks and killings, have they (police) arrested one single person? They have not. Our own is to continue to comply with the peace accord among political parties and urge the necessary authorities to call these guys to order,” he stressed.
