Candidate of the opposition All Progressives Congress in the race for Bende Federal Constituency mr Ben Kalu’s campaign suffers serious setback as morale of Party faithfuls and campaign staff are at an all time low.
Believed to have been caused by the spate of decamping that has hit the APC across Bende Federal Constituency in recent times, the Party appears to have run into more troubles as more members especially at the home town/ward of the party’s candidate continues to dump the Party to join the ruling Peoples Democratic Party.
You will recall about a week ago when the House of Representatives candidate of the PDP in Bende Dr Chimaobi Desmond Anyaso held his ward tour campaign in Bende community and received over seventy decampees from the APC into the PDP several of whom are from mr Kalu’s ward.
These events and many others continue to expose the crack in the opposition camp occasioned by a feeling of disaffection and lack of coherence.
Following series of detrimental blunders by the opposition candidate even more of his supporters are set to dump him in the coming days.
According to one of the decampees who wanted to remain anonymous; “ we were not being well funded, our cars are not maintained, no known campaign office, no salary structure for campaign staff and if you are observant you will see our cars are breaking down on a daily basis and morale of people are low”. He recalled where it started falling apart “Ben’s problem started when we noticed how arrogant and unreachable he really is. How can a man running for such an elevated office refuse to heed the plea of his own kinsmen to intervene and fix the power situation in his community”? He continued “And the most shameful part is he went ahead to try to stop Dr Chima Anyaso who came all the way from Igbere to fix the light, but we thank God that Chima has rescued us from darkness. It is really shameful and our people will never forgive him Ben for that act of sabotage” he said.
In his response, Elder Jerome Okorie the leader of the decampees from APC to PDP stated “it is obvious that even our people here in Bende have chosen PDP so I and my own followers could not continue to work for the APC because we know all our efforts will amount to failure the polls”. Jerome insisted that as an old politician, he could predict that by the way Dr Chima Anyaso of the PDP had grown so popular across Bende it would be impossible for Ben Kalu to come close, let alone alone the elections.
