Pressure mount on Akpabio’s wife, Unoma not to withdraw Onofiok Luke’s PDP ticket (Luke’s public apology to Akpabio is attached to this story)

Gov. Akpabio (L) with wife, Unoma Akpabio

Mr. Onofiok Luke

 

By Nse Peter

Governor Godswill Akpabio and his wife, Unoma Akpabio have been under intense pressure not to withdraw the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) ticket from Mr. Onofiok Luke who has just won the party’s mandate to fly its flag in 2015 House of Assembly (Nsit Ubium State Constituency) election in Akwa Ibom State.

Onofiok Luke is bidding to return to the House of Assembly for a second term.

Luke’s victory at the PDP primaries came as a shock and devastating political blow to Governor Godswill Akpabio, his wife, Unoma Akpabio and the entire Akpabio clan who had concluded before the election that the likes of Luke and Kufre Etuk (Member, representing Uruan State Constituency) would never get re-elected into the state House of Assembly for spearheading Ibibio political cause in and outside the Assembly.

But how Onofiok Luke beat his challenger Solomon Ekokoi, sponsored by the first lady of Akwa Ibom State, by wide margin ( Ekokoi had only two votes, against Luke’s 35 votes) remains a mystery for now. Luke’s comrade in the struggle for Ibibio emancipation, Obong Kufre Etuk wasn’t that lucky; he was rigged out of the PDP primaries. The latest news is that Etuk has defected to the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), where he is mostly likely going to be handed the party’s flag for the 2015 House of Assembly election.

Senator Effiong Bob and other PDP chieftains in Nsit Ubium have been putting pressure on Akpabio and his wife, Unoma, not to withdraw the PDP ticket from Onofiok Luke. Senator Bob and Akpabio is said to have met twice on the issue.

Akpabio, Think Akwa Ibom! gathered, would have succumbed to pressure by now and allow Luke’s name stay in the list of elected PDP candidates, but for the first lady, Unoma Akpabio, who have been rebuffing appeals from party elders and senior citizens. As at Tuesday, the first lady was said to have given her condition, that Luke must first publish a public apology to Governor Akpabio, before she could consider the appeal from Effiong Bob and other political leaders from Nsit Ubuim.

Onofiok Luke accepted the demands of Akpabio’s wife, and has published a public apology to the governor in the News Link newspaper of Thursday, 4 December, 2014 (see Luke’s apology to Akpabio, after the story), even as Think Akwa Ibom! gathered that the first lady is still reluctant to allow Luke stand election as PDP flag-bearer.

Unoma Akpabio, known for her unimaginable influence over her husband, Governor Akpabio and the politics of Akwa Ibom State was said to have sworn before the PDP House of Assembly primaries that the duo of Onofiok Luke and Kufre Etuk would never get near the venue of the primaries, let alone pick the party ticket, Think Akwa Ibom! learned.

The first lady, according to series of reports published in the local newspapers in the state, went as far as ‘arresting’ all the female delegates in Nsit Ubium and Uruan, including some other local government areas of the state, and locked them up in a secluded area, with their mobile phones taken away from them. The plan, as leaked by the local media, was for the ‘arrested’ female delegates to move from their place of ‘imprisonment’ straight to the polling venue where they would be forced to vote for whoever Unoma Akpabio wanted them to vote for.

Besides, another strategy was to take the primaries to Mobile Police Base at Akpabio’s hometown, Ukana, and another mobile police base near Uyo where the first family thought they could use heavily armed policemen to control the voting.

“There was an order to the governor from his brothers and spouse to get rid of the effervescent Luke for things to even,” says a local newspaper, News Link in its news report. The paper reports that parts of Onofiok Luke’s sin was his romance with former finance commissioner, Obong Bassey Albert Akpan when the latter was campaigning to become governor against Akpabio’s directive that everyone in the state should support former SSG, Mr. Udom Emmanuel, for governorship.

News Link wrote in the report: “the defeat of Uruan lawmaker, Kufre Etuk, was expected considering his ‘unfortunate romance’ with Bassey Albert.”

Onofiok Luke in the published apology to Akpabio, said “It’s common knowledge that since 2002 I have enjoyed a very deep and beneficial father-son relationship with Your Excellency. However, in the last one year, that relationship of 12 years has suffered seriously due to actions and inactions attributed to me. As a political son, I hereby take responsibility for the comments, unfavourable words, positions, ideas and ideology espoused by me which may have contradicted Your Excellency’s disposition.”

A Think Akwa Ibom! in-house analyst says that when Onofiok Luke wrote ‘ideas and ideology espoused by me which may have contradicted Your Excellency’s disposition,’ he may have refered to the campaign for the emancipation of the Ibibio people from the hands of Akpabio and his family, which Luke has been associated with.

The analyst said that the current travails of Luke in the hands of the Akpabios may not only be viewed as insult to the people of Nsit Ubium which Luke represents, but to the entire Ibibio ethnic group.

“It is very obvious even to the blind that Onofiok Luke is so loved by his own people. Even when Governor Akpabio was said to control the delegate list and didn’t want him to win, the delegates still went ahead to vote decisively for Luke, and that is a proof that he truly has the mandate of his people. In this circumstance, anything you do to disgrace him, you are doing it against the Nsit Ubium people,” the analyst said.

 

Luke's apology to Akpabio