The Commissioner for Communication and Orientation in Edo State, Chris Nehikhare has accused the All Progressives Congress (APC) of relying on propaganda to stoke the people against the palace of the Oba of Benin as a strategy for them to win the election but vowed that it would not work for them.
Nehikhare stated this during a press briefing where displayed a purported APC whatsapp group that showed some members debating the rationality or otherwise of the strategy. He urged journalists to be neutral in their work ahead of the election.
According to him, “We all agreed that we are coming into election and there is so much madness in town. It has become clear that it is the intention of the opposition to drag the reputation of our Royal Majesty into the murky waters of their dirty politics.
“All findings have revealed that apart from generating very obnoxious materials on the social media, members of the APC have been seen openly propagating this distasteful and demeaning information against the Royal Palace.
“Clearly, they have resorted to weaponizing a negative campaign against our traditional institution as their only strategy for the coming election because they do not have a sellable candidate and also lack intelligence to market their bad product. We however want to warn them that this disrespectful comment about our traditional institution is not a strategy for campaign and since they have no plan and have a defective candidate come September 2024, PDP shall trample upon them in a free and fair election to resounding victory.
“We have to be careful especially as politicians and those of us in government not to get dragged into this kind of cheap propaganda , journalists who have a role to play in these matters and the role is to be a neutral arbiter . If you see when a party takes lies and propaganda as strategy, that party has nothing to offer Edo people. We have to be careful of them, it is not our fault that the party lacks people with character, people with capacity or even people with intellect hence they ended up with the candidate which they have brought forward and it is obvious now that they are afraid to campaign for or with.
“As we speak till this very moment we have not heard anything of how they are going to better the lot of Edo people, all we hear is how they want to serve their pay masters, and to get cheap popularity they create stories, lies and propaganda to discredit a party that has done everything to improve the lives of Edo people, this government is the only government in Nigeria paying N70,000 minimum wage, we are not the biggest state receiving revenue or the biggest IGR but because our people matter to us, we have done that “