Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State, on Saturday, stated that he never said the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, offered him senatorial ticket to dump the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the APC during his media chat on Saturday.
The media aide to the governor, Kelvin Ebiri, emphasized that reports indicating that Wike said on Friday that Tinubu offered him senatorial ticket is “baseless”.
Ebiri declared: “We wish to state emphatically that this news is false, baseless, and ludicrous as the Rivers State governor throughout the media chat never mentioned the name of the APC presidential candidate or alluded to him offering him a senatorial ticket.”
Ebiri published a transcript of the section of the media chat where the governor mentioned senatorial form thus: “’First of all, this is how you know those who are prepared to run an election. Some of them collected presidential forms and at the same time collected senatorial forms. You’ll know that those people are not serious to run.
“I never collected senatorial form. Even after the whole thing, people said come and go for Senate, I said no. I won’t do that. I’ve already made a commitment that this Senate ticket should be zoned to this area (Etche) because they’ve never had it before. I must not be in power.”
The media aide, therefore, declared: “In an era of the increasingly divisive political climate, the tendency to pervert the truth is extremely high. It is on this basis that we wish to remind journalists that journalism’s first obligation is to the truth.
“At this critical juncture in our nation, we wish to remind journalists that getting the facts right is the cardinal principle of journalism. Journalists are enjoined to always strive for accuracy and give all the relevant facts in their reports. We, therefore, urge the unsuspecting public not to give any credence to these false, baseless, and ill-motivated reports.”