By Nsan Ndoma-Neji, Calabar
A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Cross River State, and the Chief Executive Officer, CEO, Opal Group, High Chief Higgins Peters, has assured supporters of the party that henceforth, the party will no longer take things for granted anymore in Cross River State, with regards to helping the party coast to victory.
Higgins was reacting to the recent bye-elections in Cross River State, where his party won the Ogoja/Yala federal constituency seat, but lost the Akpabuyo state constituency.
The Yala-born critical stakeholder stressed that the APC did not expect the kind of challenge posed by the opposition, but that the party has learnt a great deal and will restrategise and restructure ahead of the next general elections.
High Chief Peters said, “If I tell you seated here that it was easy, I will be telling a lie; we took it for granted that we were the government.
“We were the establishment and if any one of you had known the politics of the state, the politics has always been that of the establishment.
“This is the first time that Cross River State will have a credible opposition, an opposition that has been entrenched in the people’s mind, because it was almost like a culture.
“Everyone in Cross River State were all in the PDP, so moving from PDP to the mainstream and then looking at the PDP as the opposition was a challenge and these were the challenges we did not recognize until we got to the field.
“The level of fight we had in the field was not the fight we envisaged, because we thought that since we were the establishment, it was going to be an easy ride, but I will tell you without any equivocation that it was not an easy ride.
“I can tell you that going forward, we will not take things for granted anymore; and it will not be the same. The establishment will take control of the state as it were.”
The APC chieftain stated that the allegations that the election was marred with a lot of irregularities was false, stressing that the APC expected a landslide victory, but unfortunately, it got a margin of just two thousand, even when the party was in power.
He added, “You saw the margin of victory, like I said, it was not expected. I expected a landslide, an extermination of the opposition, but you can see that it was just 2,000 votes.
“This was one of the best elections conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC; if anyone contested that election, it means the person is just being dubious.
“If the establishment wanted to employ external forces to rig the elections, you would not have the result you have now. It was a clean and clear election and a clear victory.”
