*By Nelson Ogbu, Owerri*
The All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA in Imo State is currently mired in controversies following the alleged alteration of lists of delegates to the governorship primaries of the party.
On Friday, the entire leaders, ward chairmen and LGA officers of the party in Ideato North stormed the state secretariat of the party in Owerri to protest the falsification of the harmonised delegates lists which were collated from the various wards and sent to the party. The party’s state vice chairman for Orlu Zone, Chief Jerry Okwukaogu, is reportedly in the eye of the storm.
During the protest, a leader in the party, Chief Ugochukwu Onyekaba, explained that, “What we have come to do is to let the party leadership know that the list of delegates currently with them is not the one produced by our ward chairmen. Our list has been falsified by the state vice chairman, Jerry Okwukaogu.
*Ideato North APGA Leaders During The Protest*
“He ambushed our LGA chairman on his way to Owerri after the harmonisation and fronted an impostor who was escorted by armed security operatives and introduced him to our LGA chairman as the returning officer in-charge of Ideato North. Okwukaogu and the impostor then drove our chairman to a hotel along Port Harcourt Road where they coerced him to outrightly rewrite the list. We got to know about this development when our LGA chairman alerted us. Our resolution is that we must resist this atrocity with everything at our disposal.”
Meanwhile, the state chairman of the party, Barr. Peter Ezeobi, could not do anything about the situation. After hearing the insistence of the leaders that their authentic list should be upheld, Ezeobi asked them to wait for him return in thirty minutes and drove off without returning for the rest of the day.
Another LGA, Ideato South, had their authentic list torn into pieces by the state woman leader of the party, Maria Mbanuzuo, who claimed that the prospective delegates were not her loyalists.
Many chieftains of the party in the state have continued to question the integrity and neutrality of Peter Ezeobi in this whole debacle.
“We have no reason to believe that the state chairman is unaware of what his functionaries have done. In most of the LGAs, this situation is what you see. How could an issue of this nature be brought before a party chairman and he feels nonchalant about it? How could an officer of the party tear an entire delegates list and submitted a fake one yet the chairman could not utter a word? This is not just a show of incompetence but a manifestation of collusion,’ Chief Theodore Osigwe fumed.
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