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 |
ibibios,rise and screw this punk called akpabio that uses your state funds to import women from the u.s.a.,brazil,ghana for debauchery .................run that igbo parasite out of town.............never let a puppet be installed as governor of the state...................what exactly is akpbio trying to cover-up?
ReplyDeleteAniefiok should have decamped to APC and Nsit Ubium would still have elected him. does he want to be speaker? Self above State right?
ReplyDelete