By PAMELA EBOH, Awka

The Anambra State governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the November 6 poll, Senator Andy Umeh, has described as stage-managed claims by the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) that some members of his party decamped during the flag-off of campaigns by APGA on Saturday.

APGA had burnt some brooms, which is the symbol of APC as well as some uniforms as a proof that some members of the APC decamped to APGA.

A statement by the Andy Uba Campaign Organization and signed by the Campaign Director, Hon. Victor Afam Ogene, dismissed the claims, insisting that none of its members decamped to APGA.

The statement read in part: “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.

“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.”

Ogene said if as an APGA stalwart and a Governor Obiano side-kick over the last eight years, Soludo could not offer him 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.