From Joseph Obukata, Warri
The Delta State chapters of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and the All Progressive Congress (APC), are currently entangled in war of words over election violence and rigging claims.
Saturday Sun reports that trouble started after Chief Peter Nwaoboshi, the present Senator representing Delta North Senatorial District, fired a salvo at the PDP, claiming that he has mastered every rigging plan of the PDP, hitherto his party before he defected to the APC.
‘There’s no rigging plan that I don’t know. The battle has started. It’s total war. Not the war involving the use of firearms; but they will have themselves to blame should they try that’, Nwaoboshi was quoted to have said while congratulating the newly sworn-in APC Exco in the State.
But his utterances seems not to go down well with the Delta PDP, which in a statement titled; ‘we are not a party of violence, Delta PDP tells Nwaoboshi’ and signed by its publicity secretary, Dr Ifeanyi Osuoza, took Nwaoboshi to the cleaners, describing his utterances as one coming from “an attention-seeking rabble and a failed politician”.
Osuosa further in the statement liked Nwaoboshi to an ‘Okro’ plant which doesn’t grow taller than the person who planted it, saying that the PDP would continued to bend him (Nwaoboshi) to ‘size effortlessly and cut him off without any qualms or stress at all’
Continuing, the PDP publicity scribe said that Nwaoboshi, a former PDP State chairman, is a senator today by the ‘grace of the PDP who made him who he is politically’.
Dr. Osuoza’s statement reads: “We have no reason to doubt that such comments were uttered by Chief Nwaoboshi, as they are not remarkably different from his typically verbose and puerile utterings, in his futility to discredit the PDP, since he jumped into the sinking APC boat, in the assumed hope of temporarily escaping the looming indictment of an already done and dusted forensic audit report.
“Indeed, Chief Nwaoboshi had already outlived his usefulness to the PDP and had become an embarrassing liability to the party with his anti-party actions and posturings, right from the very commencement of the 9th Senate when, like a traitor without any iota of political integrity, proudly and in the public glare, became an outstanding turncoat and shameless fifth columnist in the election of the new Senate President.
“We are even surprised that a politician who has achieved all his political fortunes under the steady umbrella of the PDP, will be making comments suggesting rigging and violence. Ironically, we do not recall any extraordinary incidences of rigging and violence in the two Senatorial elections which Senator Nwaoboshi won under the PDP, or is he now confessing to the world that he achieved his Senatorial election victories by violence and rigging? What a shameless man, cutting his nose to spite his face.
“Peter Nwaoboshi knows that the PDP is not a party of violence and we have no reason to rig any election because the PDP is the most popular, the most organized, the most prepared, and the most beloved party of Deltans, comprehensively accepted and unanimously embraced across the length and breadth, nooks and crannies of the entire Delta State”.
But in a counter reactions, the Delta APC, in a statement by its Publicity Director, Dr Omene Odafe, on Friday, lampooned the PDP that it was rattled by the resurgence of the APC in the State, hence the seething attack on Senator Nwaoboshi.
He said that Nwaoboshi has become a ‘political powerhouse’ that have now been identified as ‘PDP chief nemesis in Delta North’.
Describing the PDP statement as ‘poorly packaged statement’, the APC said that Osuoza, “had, amongst numerous other shameful misrepresentations, sought to impugn the integrity of the Senator while trying to paint the APC as a party championing violence.
The APC statement reads; “Far from Senator Nwaoboshi losing his usefulness to the PDP, it is the PDP that lost a gem of rare and sterling political sagacity and resourcefulness in Nwaoboshi, when they were foolish enough to lose him to the APC.
“In fact, while pretending that Nwaoboshi’s exit is not a headache to the PDP, by continuously obsessing over the veteran political grandmaster ever since his defection, the PDP had only unwittingly exposed the fact that it is scared witless of him and that Governor Okowa, in particular, has suddenly found the prospects of his political future to be quite bleak, going forward!
“The PDP has always been the party of violence and thuggery, of thumb-printing and snatching of ballot boxes, of kill the people, steal the vote and share the money!
“Senator Nwaoboshi was merely serving notice that with the inauguration of a new executive, the APC is now fully on ground to rescue Delta State from what would eventually amount to 24 years of kleptomaniac misrule under the PDP by 2023!, the statement added.