Chijioke Agwu, Abakaliki
The Ebonyi State chapter of the All Progressives Congress(APC) has come out against the decision of the state government to ban the use of public transport motorcycles (Okada) anywhere in the state.
The party says the ban has brought untold hardship to the people, particularly to the families of the public transport motorcyclists, who depend on the business for survival.
The opposition party called on Governor Umahi to urgently relax the ban to ease the hardship on the people.
The Chairman of the party in the state, Mr Eze Nwachukwu Eze, stated this in Abakaliki while briefing journalists.
Eze said the party was in total support of the governor’s efforts towards tightening the borders across the state.
He urged the governor to ensure that the borders remain closed until the coronavirus pandemic was over.
Eze said: “We want to commend the state government on the closure of the borders in Ebonyi State. This has really worked very well and we are in support of it. We encourage them to close the borders even tighter until the COVID-19 era is over.
“We want to call on the governor to kindly consider the suffering and the plight of the Ebonyians and relax the ban on motorcycle in Ebonyi state, let it be limited to the border areas.
“The reason is obvious” Ebonyi State is an agrarian state. We are all farmers and a good number of us in Ebonyi here are poor people. A good number of Ebonyians here are poor and the only means of transportation here predominantly is the use of motorcycles.
“So, it is difficult now for people to convey their farm inputs to the farms. The implication is that if these local people who have been doing great work to farm in Ebonyi State don’t have the means to convey both humans and materials to the farms, we are afraid that the post-COVID-19 effect will be devastating.
“In the light of the above, whosoever may have advised him to put this total ban, we suggest he reverse this and relax it a little. We are not against the ban, but we are saying it should be relaxed.”
The chairman, during the press briefing, also raised concerns that APC members in the state were being excluded in the compilation of names for the Federal Government’s Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) scheme and called for the immediate inclusion of the members.