The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is not going to retract its earlier statement that the leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) aided insurgency in Nigeria.
The PDP National Publicity Secretary Olisa Metuh said this in Abuja on May 13, 2014, Tuesday.
Metuh also said that in its pursuit of power shift the opposition party was heating up the polity by distracting President Goodluck Jonathan from his transformation agenda.
Immediately after a bomb exploded at the Nyanya bus park killing more than 75 people on April 14, Metuh issueda statement in which the ruling party alleged that the attack was politically motivated and could be traced to the words of some of the APC politicians who wanted to make Nigeria ungovernable.
The PDP National Publicity Secretary Olisa Metuh
This statement followed by another one in which the PDP said that General Muhammadu Buhari, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, former FCT Minister Nasir el-Rufai, and Rivers State Governor Rotimi Amaechi had been sparking off hatred and attracting insurgents by making inflammatory remarks against the president.
Buhari demanded a public apology from the PDP and threatened to drag them to court, but his warning seems to have been ignored.
"The issue of the attack which has to do with the statement that we issued after Nyanya bombing, especially on the statement and utterances of APC leaders like Buhari and the rest of them, that statement was made and all the members of the NWC of the PDP were unanimous; they virtually agreed on it. We stood by it, we stand by it today that if the opposition leaders had been more careful with their utterances, the polity would not have been overheated," Metuh said in the Tuesday statement.
He further said that this was "the fact" that the people "encouraged" by the APC's statements were financing insurgents. "We are happy today that they have chosen the part of wisdom to tamper their voice."
To recall, on May 12 the State Security Service paraded five blast suspects. The Interpol has placed the sixth one – who is said to be the 'mastermind' of the attack – on red alert.
Sources: Daily Trust
