The PDP, while describing the viral video as a poor hatchet job intended to cast a slur on the integrity of the February 23 elections in the state, said it was the handiwork of All Progressives Congress, APC, elements who have been electorally decimated and are yet to recover from it.
A statement by Mr Linus Obogo, Deputy Chief Press Secretary to the Cross River State governor, Senator Ben Ayade, said “The PDP is already an entrenched institution spanning over 20 years in the state. Everyone knows that Cross River has always and will always be a PDP state. So, in the light of this, we have no reason to feel threatened by any force, whether real or imagined, necessitating the recruitment or hiring of anyone to mass thumb print ballot papers to secure a victory.”
Obogo, who described Cross River APC as a conglomeration perpetually at war with itself, wondered how a party whose presence in the state been mired in an internecine strife, could expect to defeat the PDP in an election, given its well documented polarity and schism.
According to him, “What APC has done in the viral video is all about struggling to save its face from the ugly trouncing and humiliation at the February 16 elections by gathering some miscreants with a stash of cash in a private residence of one of their defeated members with an intent to not only devalue the worth of its victory but also to impugn the credibility of the elections.”
Faulting the ingenuity of makers of the video, Obogo said: “The content of the video clearly exposed their scheme as a dubious parody by some disoriented desperados embarking on what I will describe as pull him down syndrome. You could see clearly that the makers of the video lacked imagination and creativity. They claimed to have been promised twenty million naira, with more than a quarter of the amount paid upfront, how come they were thumb printing with a stash of cash in display all over the place? If they were doing a clinical job, shouldn’t they have concealed the cash rather than display or have them filmed in the manner depicted in the video?
”From their conversation, even a moron could tell obviously that there was no coherence and logicality in their febrile bid to pooh-pooh our party’s well earned victory. You could see that they were just mentioning names to a justification for their mission. But it turned out so inchoate and terribly cobbled together. There is no doubt that it was clearly a poor imitation intended to frame up someone.
“The video is a concoction of some depraved and desperate minds, out to either tarnish the image of our party or that of the government or at best put a question mark on the credibility and transparency of the February 16 elections.
“I want state unambiguously and without any equivocation that neither our government nor our party has anything to do with the claims and content of the Web video and we condemn it in the strongest terms possible. How could a party which has never been on ground in the state expect to go into an electoral contest and win against a well-established and united front like the PDP? We worked so hard with an excellent strategy of door-to-door mobilization to earn us a victory.
”The governor’s food on the table initiative was the masterstroke that secured our victory. We envisaged no threat whatsoever.
“The trashing of February 23 was a clear signal of yet another crushing defeat that will be unleashed on the APC in the March 9 governorship and House of Assembly elections. As party and government, we are too politically sophisticated and culturally refined to engage in such an unethical and base conduct as depicted in the video. The only place to locate that is in a canine dog-eat-dog party which the state APC typifies, where foul is fair and all is fair in war.
“While I urge them to go about licking the wounds of their electoral defeat with all the fortitude they can muster, let me make it known to them that the matter has been reported to the police and it will be investigated, with the faces already identified in the video exposed and prosecuted. At the fullness of time, those behind the farcical video will be unmasked. This, we can assure Cross Riverians.”
