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By Joel Anekwe
Precious Elekima, governorship candidate of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Rivers State, caused a serious stir Friday in Port Harcourt at the venue BBC Pidgin organised governorship debate threatening to disrupt the event due to the exclusion of his name from the five candidates listed for the exercise.
The visibly angry governorship candidate accused the organisers of bribe collection to exclude some of the candidates who should participate in the debate insisting that so long as the debate was called governorship debate, he, representing the SDP must be allowed to take part.
He fumed: “What is going on is that the BBC has hired some people to come and cause trouble in Rivers State. They came here, they said they want to carry out a governorship debate. Now they didn’t interact with anybody. There was no physical assessment of anybody, they didn’t see anybody. Then they sat down to say that they have carried out a private study and the private study has mapped out these candidates.
Now 89 parties adopted the governor, except APC and SDP, 46 or 47 governorship candidates adopted him (Wike), so which people are left? If the country has 91 parties and 89 adopted him apart from SDP and APC? So the whole thing is a charade here.”
He expressed sadness that BBC could be involved in what he described as a fraud, adding that “why we are reacting is that if you let this fraud to go on and do not talk, innocent people will think that what they have done is real.”
But in response, Adejuwon Soyinka, editor, BBC Pidgin explained that none of the candidates participating in the debate was directly invited by the BBC but were selected by the audience through the social media in response to enquiries by the organisation to nominate the candidates they wanted to participate in the debate.
On the allegation of bribery and fraud, Soyinka denied any such, challenging the SDP governorship candidate to provide any evidence of such allegations.
However the matter was later resolved and Elekima was allowed to participate in the debate which was at its eighth level having been held in seven other states using the same Facebook selection by followers of the BBC Pidgin.
The debate which lasted for about one a half hours was very interesting and animated even though the incumbent governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and Dumo Lulu-Briggs of the Accord Party were absent.
According to officials of the BBC, Wike did not respond to all the efforts to contact him after the selection was made, while Lulu-Briggs was at the venue earlier but had to leave when the event was taking too long to commence.
Four candidates in all participated in the debate telling Rivers State people in Pidgin English how the plan to govern the state in the next four years if they were elected as governor.
The participants include: Victor Fingesi – Action Democratic Party (ADP), Eniye Braide- African Democratic Congress (ADC), Isaac Wonwu – Labour Party (LP) and Precious Elekima – Social Democratic Party (SDP).
