The Rivers State Chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) has appealed to aggrieved chairmanship and councillorship aspirants of the party to follow laid-down channels to present their grievances instead of taking actions which may portray them and the party in bad light.

Rivers APC Chairman, Dr. Davies Ibiamu Ikanya, made the appeal in a statement on the Local Government Election which the Rivers State Independent Electoral Commission (RSIEC) has scheduled to hold on May 23, 2015 in 22 out of the 23 councils in the state.

“We wish to remind all aggrieved aspirants that APC is a party founded on justice and to assure them that we will never deviate from that path. However, we realise that this is an imperfect human system and that mistakes are bound to occur sometimes, but we wish to assure that necessary steps would be taken to correct every proven case of injustice,” Ikanya said in the statement issued this morning in Port Harcourt.

He appealed to all aggrieved party members to exercise restraint as they seek justice, cautioning them to avoid embarking on actions which may turn out to be counter-productive.

The Rivers APC Chairman in the statement also lambasted the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) “for cowardly chickening out of the council polls,” saying that the party is taking the action because it is afraid of suffering woeful defeat in the election.

“It is instructive that out of the 28 active parties in the State, only PDP is threatening to boycott the council polls on flimsy excuses. Contrary to the claims of the party, Governor Chibuike Amaechi did not fix the date of the election but it was fixed by the independent electoral body saddled with that responsibility. Besides, there is no court order stopping the polls as claimed by Rivers PDP,” Dr. Ikanya stated.

He declared that “the truth of the matter is that PDP in Rivers State is afraid of all the evil acts it has committed against the people of the state, including the brazen rigging of the recent national elections with the connivance of the Independent national Electoral Commission, thus its trepidation at the thought of facing the grassroots in the May 23rd Local Government Council election.”

Rivers APC told the State PDP “to prepare for more heartaches as the gubernatorial mandate stolen by the party’s leader in the State, Chief Nyesome Wike, will soon be retrieved because Wike will not last more than three months in office before he will be disgraced and unseated by the Election Tribunal.”

•Photo shows Ikanya.

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