RIVERS APC: Amaechi, Abe on the warpath again

The rocky relationship between the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, and the immediate former senator representing Rivers South-East Senatorial District, Magnus Abe, may have resumed over the planned staging of the congresses of the Rivers State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

According to the former lawmaker, the announcement by Amaechi that the congresses would be conducted in Rivers was unacceptable.

It would be recalled that Amaechi had announced to his supporters shortly after his inauguration in Abuja by President Muhammadu Buhari that there would be congress in the state.

A statement signed by Abe’s spokesman, Parry Benson, stated that the lawmaker spoke at the weekend when members of the APC Visionary Media Team paid him a courtesy visit at his residence in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.

According to him, rather than concentrate on achieving the needed contribution to national development, Amaechi was creating another avenue for tension and crisis in the political structure of the party, adding that the minister was demonstrating the same unruly behaviour that brought the party in Rivers State to a fiasco.

He, however, called on the minister to demonstrate his sincerity in rebuilding the party by consulting others and showing respect for the rights and feelings of all members of the party, while also appealing to members to be resolute and committed to the growth of the party in the state.

“Look at the state of our party here today in Rivers State, yet the Minister of Transportation, on assumption of office as Minister of Transportation; the first thing he did was to announce congresses in Rivers State and I ask myself, this was the same kind of behaviour that led the party to where it is.

“Everybody in Nigeria knows that the origin of the crisis in Rivers APC was from the congress and how the congress was handled and there are extant judicial pronouncements on the last congress, which the party was misled to ignore and we have all kept quiet in the hope that by keeping quiet, we will create room for resolution of some of these challenges, so that the party can move forward.

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”Instead, you become more brazen in your challenge to the rights, feelings, and interest of others within the same political party. How do we do that and expect to make progress?

”What kind of congress? Is he the chairman of the party? Is he the National Working Committee? Is he the court? What gives him the power to come and announce congress on the day he was inaugurated as a minister?

”Rather than address the issues of the country and the issues of his ministry, the first thing he could do was to reopen the sourest point in the heart of members of the party. And it is on that basis that party members are deprived of all rights and benefits in the party we all suffered to build. Is that how to grow a political family? Is that how to grow politics? We will not accept that congress.

”Minister cannot sit in his office and make pronouncement on a matter in which he and several other people have interest; people have gone to court, people have fought for their rights in that congress and the same thing that he did before, by creating confusion in the first place, he is determined to continue to do it because he wants to prove to the world that he is a conqueror. As I said before, nobody can conquer Rivers people”, Senator Abe said.

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