Ikpeazu: If It were Death Sentence I’d Have Been Executed long ago

Embattled Abia State Governor, Dr. Okezie Ikpeazu, Tuesday said he was lucky to be alive because if the court judgment that annulled his election had been a death sentence, he would have been executed in a haste without opportunity to appeal the sentence.

He expressed this alarm when he received a delegation of Concerned Lawyers who came to pay him solidarity visit at government house, saying that the attempt to hastily implement the judgment of Justice Okon Abang was suspicious.

“The Abuja High Court ruling denied me of the right to exercise my fundamental human rights, which is the right of appeal. So if it was a case of execution, I would have been killed without giving me time to exercise my right of appeal before a court of competent jurisdiction,” he said.

Earlier, the governor had told members of his cabinet, who came on solidarity visit that he had indeed survived a coup plot hatched by all those involved in the “desperate efforts” to unseat him.

“The plot to remove me as governor was a coup d’état. I can’t imagine that somebody who never contested election is seeking to be made a governor through the back door. I can’t understand the rush by INEC to issue Uche Ogah with a certificate of return. I also can’t comprehend the rush to swear him in,” he declared in bewilderment.

Ikpeazu noted that the inference from the whole circumstances surrounding the bid to remove him was that the motive was not just the issue of tax as implied in the court judgment, alluding that the office of governor was being made to appear as a cash and carry commodity.

“The truth is that it goes beyond the issue of tax. I want to appeal to our Igbo brothers to see politics as a game of a winner and a loser. They should not bring the mercantile business style into politics. It won’t help us,” he said.

The governor told the lawyers that it was regrettable that a peaceful state like Abia was now being presented as a state at war with itself, adding that the political imbroglio had generated so much tension and polarised the state.

Ikpeazu used the forum to thank the lawyers in the state for educating the people of the state on the need to remain calm, “As the desperados had already come into the state to wreak havoc.”