“My biggest achievement is that I’m bequeathing the safest state and the most stable state. It is also that I’m bequeathing a state that has moved up the ladder of education, came first for four years in the West African School Council exams, that has built two industries and employed over 10,000 workers. These are there for all to see.”
These were the words of Okezie Ikpeazu, as he gave his final assessment to his eight-year, two-term tenure as governor of Abia State, that will come to an end on May 29, while appearing as a guest on Politics Today, a current affairs programme of Channels Television, on Thursday.
Ikpeazu also has a word for the world and incoming government of Alex Otti: “This government is bequeathing the first multi-development plan to the new government, the first industrial policy. If the leave the realm of propaganda, history and prosperity will be fair to us.”
It was also a day the governor urged Nigerians to look into the unusual excitement of Nnenna Nnannaya-Oti, the Returning Officer (RO) of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) at the just-concluded March 18 governorship election in the state, who he accused of of being unfair to all parties that participated in the poll.
On March 22, Nnannaya-Oti, who is the Vice Chancellor of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, declared Otti candidate of the Labour Party (LP) the winner of election, 48 hours after INEC suspended the exercise to resolve the hiccups that arose from the Obingwa results collation.
Otti scored 175,467, to beat Okey Ahiwe of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of Ikpazu, who polled 88,529, apart from winning 10 of the 17 local government areas in the state.
The VC who returned to a heroic welcome to FUTO, on Tuesday, described how she was threatened and offered bribe to pressurise he to manipulate the result of the poll but she stood her ground, but that she had to reject all that in the interest of the people, telling her excited audience that she had never done any disreputable act in her official and private life.
But Ikpeazu, told his host on the programme: “This is very unfortunate. I have not met that professor and I am shocked because in the first place, if she is a professor, she doesn’t even have the capacity to manipulate results because these are results that emanated from the units, collected at the wards, collected at the local governments and brought for her to just add them up and announce.
“I’ve not met her before. I’ve not spoken to her. If I have met her, if I have spoken to her, let her come to the public and declare so. So, I am shocked that she is making a big noise out of nothing.
“At some point when I saw the coincidence in name and traced a little bit of her background, I complained to INEC that this lady was not going to be fair but they assured me that they profiled her. I am still shocked.
“What she has betrayed in the aftermath of her service or stewardship in Abia, indicates that fact that she is visibly happy with what she did. Her level of bias in that regard could be placed in favour of a party. She has betrayed that she has something at the back of mind before she came.”
