Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State has mocked a former National Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Iyorchia Ayu over the party’s failure in the 2023 presidential election.
Wike, who championed the call for Ayu’s resignation in the leadup to the elections, claimed the Benue-born PDP chieftain has no electoral value.
“So, you can see that he has nothing to offer to the party. We won here which means we have something to offer to the party. Ayu has nothing to offer to the party,” the governor said in a media chat with selected journalists in Port Harcourt on Tuesday.
While the PDP has appointed an acting national chairman, Wike says the development means little. But he expressed happiness that Ayu did not quit as the PDP chairman before the election.
“What advantage is Ayu’s stepping aside?” he asked.
But he admits that “we are happy that Ayu did not go that time because if he had gone, they would have been saying that it was because he left that is why we lost [the presidential election].”
On the post-election crisis in Rivers State, Wike described it as “nothing abnormal” but maintained that the PDP is “vigilant”.
“There is nothing that is abnormal that you think that is going on in Port Harcourt. What PDP is doing is just to be vigilant,” he said.
“Vigilant in the sense that during the 2015 [post-election period] precisely, after the elections, after the nomination, we had problems that we never believed, and so we didn’t want a recurrence of that at the tribunal.”