Peter Obi, the Labour Party’s presidential candidate in the polls on February 25, has alleged that Nyesom Wike, the governor of Rivers State, spoke out against him throughout the election.
The electorate knew what he stood for, according to Obi, who said that those who supported him did not do so on the basis of their ethnicity. He continued by saying that Lagos natives gave him more votes than so-called “visitors.”
“In the South-East, it is a similar situation, people know me, people know what I stand for, people know I have kept my promises. People know I’ve kept to what I have said.
“It is a simple thing, people go about and say, oh! he got votes in Lagos because of the Igbo, and I ask how many Igbos live in Lagos? I got more votes from indigenes in Lagos than those who you can call visitors.
“Are the Igbo in Nasarawa, are the Igbo in Plateau, are the Igbo in Abuja? In Rivers, where you know that the governor came out against me and everything, I still… If the real votes of Rivers were counted, Reuben, I won. I had over 50 something per cent of the vote.
“The other two parties were sharing the others,” Obi said while featuring on Arise TV on Monday.
According to reports, Wike recently asserted that Obi was still the election’s hero and that if the LP’s front-runner hadn’t run, the North would have continued to hold power.
In spite of Obi not being declared the winner, Wike claimed in a town hall speech to Igbo traders on Saturday in Port Harcourt, the state capital, that Obi’s election participation ensured a southerner will become the next president.
The governor claimed that the People’s Democratic Party would have won the states where Obi scored victories, maintaining its hold on power in the North.
“In this election that we just did,” he said, “Obi is my hero, as far as I’m concerned. If he didn’t contest, power would have remained in the North.”
After receiving 231,591 votes from the state’s 23 local government areas, the All Progressives Congress candidate Bola Tinubu was declared the winner in Rivers.
The Labour Party won five local government districts, the APC won 14, while the PDP took home four.
“From the final collated results, the APC polled 231,591, while the Labour Party scored 175,071 and the PDP, 88,468 to come second and third respectively,” the state Collation Officer, Prof Charles Adias, had said.
