The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Rivers State, and a senior legal practitioner, Dr. Chukwuma Chinwo, have criticised Governor Nyesom Ezenwo Wike over the ban on the use of public schools in the state for political campaigns without permission from the State Ministry of Education.
Wike had in a statewide broadcast on Friday, announced that he had signed Executive Order 21, directing political parties to pay a whopping sum of N5 million to the state government for security before getting approval to use public schools for political campaigns.
While the APC said the governor’s Executive Order 21 contravened Section 91 of the 2022 Electoral Act, Chinwo held that the governor benefitted from the process during his campaigns ahead of the 2015 and 2019 governorship elections in the State.
The APC, in statement signed by its acting Publicity Secretary, Darlington Nwauju, said: “We wish to draw the attention of the public to Section 91 of the 2022 Electoral Act, which resonates with Section 40 of the Constitution.
“And in layman’s language: No political party in Nigeria can be prevented from holding rallies, processions or meetings. It is also the duty of the Commissioner of Police in each state to provide adequate security cover for such rallies or meetings and also in a consultative manner resolve any conflict of time and venue amongst the political parties.
“No state government can amend any section of the Electoral Act by issuing decrees that are strange to the Electoral Act. The INEC Chairman recently warned state governments against using the power of incumbency to intimidate opponents.
“Will the PDP in Rivers State pay the cautionary fee of N5 million and write applications 2weeks ahead of time before it uses any public school for rallies?
“We suspect that there is a grand plot to deploy all sorts of underhand tactics to intimidate political opponents in the state; narrow the political space, shush every voice of reason and turn all known democratic ethos upside down.
“We ask again; does this move by the state government not completely make nonsense of the recently signed peace accord?”
On his part, Barrister Chinwo, who spoke on a live radio programme monitored in Port Harcourt, stated that the Executive Order 21 was a wrong policy from the Wike-led administration in the State.
He said: “It is a wrong policy. When Wike campaigned in 2015 and 2019, he did not pay money to use public schools. I was teaching at the RSU then. The government should have directed each local government areas to build civic centres for such occasion.
“Our youths should have where they should be exercising themselves. For me, that policy is wrong because he was never asked to pay any fee when he was campaigning.”
