Governor Nyesom Wike has refuted reports suggesting that the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential candidate Bola Tinubu offered him a senatorial ticket to defect to the party after the Rivers State leader lost the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s presidential primary poll.
The reports had claimed that Wike made the comment during a media chat on Friday but the governor’s media aide Kelvin Ebiri says the stories are “baseless”.
“We wish to state emphatically that this news is false, baseless, and ludicrous as the Rivers State governor throughout the media chat never mentioned the name of the APC presidential candidate or alluded to him offering him a senatorial ticket,” he said.
Ebiri also shared a transcript of the media parley where the governor made a comment about senatorial form as thus: “’First of all, this is how you know those who are prepared to run an election. Some of them collected presidential forms and at the same time collected senatorial forms. You’ll know that those people are not serious to run.
“’I never collected senatorial form. Even after the whole thing, people said come and go for Senate, I said no. I won’t do that. I’ve already made a commitment that this Senate ticket should be zoned to this area (Etche) because they’ve never had it before. I must not be in power.’”
He added that “in an era of the increasingly divisive political climate, the tendency to pervert the truth is extremely high. It is on this basis that we wish to remind journalists that journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
“At this critical juncture in our nation, we wish to remind journalists that getting the facts right is the cardinal principle of journalism. Journalists are enjoined to always strive for accuracy and give all the relevant facts in their reports. We, therefore, urge the unsuspecting public not to give any credence to these false, baseless, and ill-motivated reports.”
