Former governorship candidate and chieftain of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Rivers State, Prince Tonye Princewill, has stressed the need to address challenges facing the party in the state towards making it successful in 2023 elections.
Princewill maintained that if the APC becomes serious and fixes its house, the Peoples Democratic Party would not be a problem to the party.
He insisted that such move should come first before discussing who would get the party’s governorship ticket for 2023. Princewill stated this in a chat with newsmen at the weekend.
He said: “Everybody is saying governorship ambition and I ask, what is having a governorship ticket when you cannot win an election on the platform of the party. We need a party that is viable, a party that is serious, and a party that is dedicated.
“Then you can talk about governorship ambitions. There is no point owning a ticket that cannot win an election. APC, as it stands, is not in a position to win an election but we believe that in the next few months, we will see the level of seriousness to face the forthcoming elections.”
“If anybody looks carefully, they will see that APC has the capacity to organise. But, having the capacity to organise is not the same thing as organising. We have a faction of APC within Rivers State, which Magnus Abe is running and every attempt at stopping Emeka Beke from being chairman didn’t work and Emeka Beke was sworn-in as chairman.”
Princewill insisted that the problems facing APC in the state was self-inflicted and not Governor Nyesom Ezenwo Wike as many people were made to believe.
The APC chieftain added: “Everybody complains about Wike; yes, Wike made major blunders, you cannot take that away from him. But he has done some good things and he had taken advantage of APC’s internal issues.
“I have told some people that APC is the biggest problem of APC and not Wike. When people talk about Wike, I don’t bother myself because Wike is not our issue. Our issue is ourselves.
“A properly organized, well-run party will run him out of town. We did so in 2019 and it was all open and short before INEC decided to suspend the election and declared what they declared. So, Wike is not an issue, the issue is ourselves.”
