The Rivers State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, has dismissed the panel set up by the Inspector-General of Police to investigate the violence
unleashed on Rivers people during the just concluded Saturday, December 10, re-run election in the State as a mere make-believe.
The party in a statement by its chairman, Bro. Felix Obuah and signed by his Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Jerry Needam noted the contradictions, inconsistencies, biases and double standards that characterize the position of the Nigeria Police with regard to the re-run election, making it foolhardy of any serious minded person or group to take such police panel serious.
For such panel to make sense to the Rivers people, the statement added, the police high command especially the Inspector-General of Police should first do the needful by proving to the Rivers people and indeed, all Nigerians that he is not a member of the All Progressives Congress, APC, or at best, sympathetic to APC’s cause.
Bro. Obuah regretted that the IGP, as the chief law enforcement officer of the country’s civil life should throw caution to winds by demonstrating in very unmistakable terms in a manner that ensured that the APC have an edge in an election that he ought to be neutral.
First and foremost according to the State PDP boss, the police high command ordered and did withdraw all orderlies attached to all politicians, only to turn back to attach all the orderlies withdrawn from the PDP politicians to those of the APC.
“There was no APC candidate or Chieftain on that day of election that did not have no fewer than 50 policemen attached to them while those of the PDP were left to their own fate.
This was to enable them do what they did, intimidating, beating, traumatizing, and coercing electoral officers and forcefully carrying away the ballot boxes and electoral materials to their own collation centre at a Hotel at Wiiyaakara, in Khana Local Government Area, Rivers State, which belongs to Mr. Derrick Mene, the Director of Administration and Finance of the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, also a member of the APC and strong ally of the APC Senatorial Candidate in the Rivers South-East, Magnus Abe”.
The same hotel was used as detention camp, where PDP members were arrested, detained and tortured. The Ward Chairman of PDP Ward 10, Mr. Legborsi Azoor, who was among those detained and tortured in Mr. Derrick’s Hotel in Wiiyaakara died Thursday, December 15, 2016, while others are still in critical condition.
Bro. Obuah said for the IGP to pretend not to be part of all this nor knew about it and only to turn around to set up a panel to investigate the atrocities committed by his obedient messengers and APC paymasters smacks of hypocrisy and that the PDP cannot be further deluded to trust him or be part of such mere ‘cover-up’ panel.
Further likening the police investigation panel by the IGP to a judge presiding over his own case, Bro. Obuah said the outcome of such panel can rightly be predicted.
“All that we simply require of the Nigeria police is to clear themselves of all the blood of innocent Rivers youth they spilled, the recourse to patronizing the former militants who were in the vanguard of the military and police invasion of Rivers State and the mayhem unleashed on the people on that fateful December 10, re-run election.
Except these clarifications are made, the PDP and the good people of Rivers State are wont to say emphatically that this is yet another big insult on their collective intelligence and must not be allowed to prevail,” the State PDP boss stated.