By Tony Adibe
The attention of our organization, the Enugu Peace Renaissance (EPR) has been drawn to a “new wave of heightened calumny, smear politics and exacerbated media siege against the Government of Enugu State by some unscrupulous elements masquerading with the name of a few political parties; either as candidates or their cronies.”
EPR in a statement issued in Enugu on Thursday, by its publicity secretary, Hon. Obiora Ugwu, said that silence would have been “golden but for the exacerbation of their misleading, reckless but relentlessly spewed lies both in sophistry and volume,” hence the need for this reaction.
Hon. Ugwu also reminded the Enugu people that as the campaign for the 2023 election gathers momentum more of such “baseless and spurious concoctions are bound to surface.”
He emphasised that on the 23rd of February and the 11th of March, 2023, the Enugu electorate will nonetheless, remind “all the naysayers that politics and electioneering proceedings have been elevated beyond the reach of pedestrian proclivities and that the future of our generation has been shielded from these notorious, egregious and Lilliputian Characters.”
He also said: “With the evolving level of political awareness and a rising crescendo of expectations pervading the polity, leadership recruitment process must not only be transparent but devoid of baseless calumny.”
He quickly added: “Therefore, would-be managers of statecraft must win the sympathy and votes of the electorate through robust, sustained and persuasive issue-based campaigns premised on achievable milestones.
Multifarious and mutating maladies of insecurity and economic hardship ravaging the socio-economic and political space appear to be topmost in the people’s emergency list. It therefore strains all logics, defies all imaginations and mangles all credulity to watch in anguish as some desperate politicians target the government of Enugu state for cheap blackmail.”
He said that the 2023 General Elections, no doubt, have provided yet another opportunity for “shameless politicians to further fan the embers of discord, deepen the echoes of the deafening mediocrity, enlarge the coast of the unprovoked animosity and expand the frontiers of the enduring clannishness driving their cynical aspiration to political power.”
Ugwu stated further that while such politicians are promising “heaven on earth” to an otherwise highly enlightened and intellectually persuaded people of the state, “these defiant politicians throw caution to the winds while discountenancing the resurgent political awareness of the citizenry in their elusive search for political capital.”
According to him, the good people of Enugu State clearly understand the “perverse trait of nauseating irredentism, barefaced deceit and engraved bitterness upon which their antagonistic and aggressive ambitions have been foisted, just like they vividly acknowledge the endlessly yawning abyss separating genuine people-focused aspiration, driven by a well articulated ideology, and a whimsically concocted ambition fueled and reinforced by rebellion.”
The statement further reads: “Let these bigoted advocates and traducers by schism be told that no one will be allowed to surreptitiously manipulate the conscience of Ndi-Enugu by either disguising or hiding under the banner of pseudonyms in the social media.
“A highly treacherous, extremely wicked and bigoted character whose tainted history is inexhaustibly laced in sectional chauvinism, crass incompetence and disdain for rule of law will not be allowed by the electorate to preside over the future of Ndi-Enugu. While donning the toga of doves in the eyes of unsuspecting but innocent persons, these characters are so fundamentally steeped and irreparably marooned in rebellious and unjust inclinations rooted against the poorer majority.
“We are persuaded to believe that some candidates in the coming elections by their own submissions are clannish bigots and champions of divisive and violent politics. Vestiges of their destructive past still glaringly stare at the resilient people of Enugu who are vigilantly watching to repel the incursions of these marauding politicians punching with venom to reduce our peaceful state to a lawless fiefdom.
“Those who make inflammatory and provocative statements capable of igniting unnecessary rift in the state are hereby advised to sheath their sword. As members of this noble organization, we have diligently watched the true nature and peaceful dispositions of the Government of Enugu State as much as we have religiously watched the entirety of the political class.
” It is instructive to note that the Government of Enugu State has consciously avoided offending and bruising the temperament of the good people of Enugu; famous for their uncanny savvy, intellectual nobility, sublime virility, exquisite power of imagination and peerless sense of history.
“Interestingly, we know these purveyors of restiveness in the state. Their unenviable profile of recycled theatricals and innuendos betray a sense of looming failure and reinforced liability that their unholy aspirations posit.
“We wish however, to commend all the candidates for 2023 General Elections and most especially of Enugu extraction who devoutly espouse their manifestos, enunciate issue-based policies, canvass sound arguments, while effortlessly dismantling the cheap and nefarious mendacities of desperate opponents without recourse to further aspersions, tantrums, lies, innuendos or smearing calumny.
