By Emma Ogbuehi
Andy Uba Campaign Organisation, the platform for the All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate for the November 6 Anambra governorship election, Senator Andy Uba, has put a lie to the claims by the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) that 20,000 APC defected to its fold during the Saturday, September 26 campaign flag-off of its candidate, Professor Charles Soludo.
In a release by former House of Representatives member, Victor Ogene for and on behalf of the Andy Uba Governorship Campaign Organisation, the group mocked APGA and the Governor Willie Obiano administration for not being in touch with realities on ground, sniggering that they should rather await the mother of all defections, when in few days prominent political figures from across all platforms would announce their entry into the APC. It insisted that Soludo lacks the capacity and antecedents to turn around the state.
The statement read:
“Yesterday, Saturday, September 25, 2021, an admix of coerced civil servants, rented groups and remnants of the fast receding All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA in Anambra State gathered at the Ekwueme Square, Awka for the flag off of the party’s gubernatorial campaigns.
“But with the event shunned by leading party stalwarts, the organizers resorted to a circus, a comic display wherein they claimed that a phantom 20,000 All Progressives Congress, APC members had joined APGA. The evidence: burning of not more 20 pieces of broom, with none of the purported decampees adorned even with the title of a ward Chairman.
“Yet, major distraught APGA leaders who boycotted the event included but are not limited to the state’s deputy governor, Dr. Nkem Okeke, wife of the late Biafran leader and alter ego of APGA, Iyom Bianca Odumegwu Ojukwu, current House of Representatives members, Ifeanyi Momah and Okwudili Ezenwankwo, no fewer than five state Assembly members, as well as the duo of Honourables Ben Nwankwo and Ifeanyi Ibezi.
“Instead of APGA seeking to hoodwink ndi Anambra into believing that it is still a serious party, they should rather await the mother of all defections, when in few days prominent political figures from across all platforms would announce their entry into the APC.
“As for the APGA candidate’s open admission at the flag off that Anambra is, indeed, broken, hence his desire to make it “livable”, we hasten to remind him of his hitherto mute disposition while the state stealthily degenerated into an urban jungle.
“In deed, regarding Professor Charles Soludo’s promise to ‘produce 1,000 youth millionaires every year’ as well as ‘ensure that 130,000 jobs are created yearly in Anambra’, our simple reaction would be: let Ndi Anambra be the judge.
“For, if as an APGA stalwart and a Governor Obiano sidekick over the last eight years, Soludo could not offer his Principal the magic wand to put in place an enduring system that would have achieved these goals, then it is quite easy to see through his professed dedication to the state. After all, Soludo is chairman of Governor Obiano’s Vision 2070 grandiose plan.
“As a matter of fact, conventional wisdom instructs that when someone offers to gift you a shirt, you first examine the one he is putting on. For a Soludo who over a decade since his exit as Governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank, is unable to complete a memorial hospital he started in honour of his mother, his promise to Anambra youths is, at best, a theoretical excursion.
“Coming against the backdrop of the derelict and decaying road infrastructure across the state, mountainous refuse heaps and excruciating taxation on ordinary Anambrarians, one does not need to be clairvoyant to observe that our dear state is, indeed, broken, and cannot be fixed by someone who for several years denied this insistent reality.
“Luckily, respite is on the way, with the APC and Senator Andy Uba’s Igwebuike message, which seeks to harness the collective strength of ndi Anambra into truly making our state, the Light of the Nation.”