Thugs attack Rivers APC guber candidate Tonye Cole in pH

CANDIDATE of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the governorship election in Rivers State Tonye Cole was on Monday, April 3, attacked by thugs who attempted to prevent him from accessing the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) office in Port Harcourt.

Cole said he, along with other party members, had arrived the INEC office to get documents required to challenge the election of the state’s governor-elect Siminalayi Fubara of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

Cole alleged that the thugs were sent by the PDP and threw stones, food and water at him till he was wounded.

“On Friday, we were at INEC, and we asked for these documents, but they have not given us a single one. We said we were coming back today (Monday) and because we said we are coming back today, the PDP organised thugs everywhere to prevent us from getting to the INEC office.

“I wasn’t deterred and so I went with my party chairman, the women leader, the youth leader, and senior officials of the APC to the INEC office.

“They had barricaded the road from GRA Junction, everywhere boys, girls. They began to assault me, I came out and a woman began to drag my shirt, they pulled me from the back, first, they were throwing water then they began to throw food and the next minute they started throwing stones.”

He also noted that there were also gunshots during the attack and his vehicles were destroyed in the process.

“We are supposed to be in a democracy and one of the tenets of democracy is that after an election, INEC being supposedly an impartial umpire will have documents and these documents are available to everybody who participated in the election.

“These are critical documents which when we take to an electoral tribunal, we will build our case upon that to the electoral tribunal,” Cole noted.

He urged INEC to move the venue of the election tribunal out of the state as the violence and tension could affect the process.

Cole lost the governorship election held in Rivers to PDP candidate Fubara, who won with 302,614 votes. The APC candidate got 95,274 votes but rejected the result declared by INEC.

Cole, who insists he won, has vowed to reclaim his mandate at the tribunal.

On election day, Cole alleged that voters in certain areas of the state were intimidated by the ruling PDP.

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Ijeoma Opara is a journalist with The ICIR. Reach her via vopara@icirnigeria.org or @ije_le on Twitter.