The lingering soured relationship between the Minister of Transportation, Mr Rotimi Amaechi and the former lawmaker representing Rivers South-East Senatorial District, Senator Magnus Abe, has again worsened.
WARRI TODAY can report that the feud which led to the failure of the All Progressives Congress (APC) to produced candidates for the 2019 general elections is resurfacing over plan for the party to conduct fresh congress in the state.
Abe, a former ally of Amaechi, has disagreed with the Minister of Transportation over move to conduct the congresses of the APC in Rivers State.
In a statement on Monday, Senator Abe said the announcement by Amaechi that the congresses would be conducted in Rivers was unacceptable.
Amaechi was said to have announced to his supporters shortly after his inauguration in Abuja by President Muhammadu Buhari that there would be congress in the state.
But according to a report in The PUNCH, Abe spoke at the weekend when members of the APC Visionary Media Team paid him a courtesy visit at his residence in Port Harcourt, the Rivers State capital.
He said in the statement signed by his spokesperson, Mr. Parry Benson, that rather than concentrate on achieving the needed contribution to national development, Amaechi was creating another avenue for tension and crisis in the political structure of the party.
Abe pointed out that the minister was demonstrating the same unruly behaviour that brought the party in Rivers State to a fiasco.
The senator urged the minister to demonstrate his sincerity in rebuilding the party by consulting others and showing respect for the rights and feelings of all members of the party.
Abe, however, appealed to members to be resolute and committed to the growth of the party in the state.
He assured the group that even if he was out of office, he was still a politician committed to the development of the party, insisting that what is needed is peace, inclusiveness, progress and the commitment of all members to move the party forward.
“Look at the state of our party here today in Rivers State, yet the Minister of Transportation, on assumption of office as Minister of Transportation; the first thing he did was to announce congresses in Rivers State and I ask myself, this was the same kind of behaviour that led the party to where it is.
“Everybody in Nigeria knows that the origin of the crisis in Rivers APC was from the congress and how the congress was handled and there are extant judicial pronouncements on the last congress, which the party was misled to ignore and we have all kept quiet in the hope that by keeping quiet, we will create room for resolution of some of these challenges, so that the party can move forward.
”Instead, you become more brazen in your challenge to the rights, feelings, and interest of others within the same political party. How do we do that and expect to make progress?
”What kind of congress? Is he the chairman of the party? Is he the National Working Committee? Is he the court? What gives him the power to come and announce congress on the day he was inaugurated as a minister?
”Rather than address the issues of the country and the issues of his ministry, the first thing he could do was to reopen the sourest point in the heart of members of the party. And it is on that basis that party members are deprived of all rights and benefits in the party we all suffered to build. Is that how to grow a political family? Is that how to grow politics? We will not accept that congress.
”Minister cannot sit in his office and make pronouncement on a matter in which he and several other people have interest; people have gone to court, people have fought for their rights in that congress and the same thing that he did before, by creating confusion in the first place, he is determined to continue to do it because he wants to prove to the world that he is a conqueror. As I said before, nobody can conquer Rivers people.
