Ikpeazu replies Adeyemi on ‘drunk’ taunt, hails Abaribe

S’East PDP gives Kogi senator seven days to apologise
Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia State has described Senator Smart Adeyemi as a mad man looking for rags to pick, hence that he will not join issues with him.

But the governor hailed Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe (Abia South) as a lawmaker synonymous with service to his people.

Speaking against Adeyemi’s tag on him as a champagne guzzling governor, Ikpeazu said: “If a madman picks your cloth while you are in the bathroom and takes off and you go after him naked, nobody will know who is mad between both of you.”

Senator Adeyemi (Kogi West), while contributing to a motion on the urgent need for the restoration and revalidation of the Safe School Initiative in Nigeria, had expressed sympathy for Abia people for being governed by a champagne drinking governor.

Ikpeazu, who was special guest of honour at the presentation of Abaribe’s book entitled Made in Aba, described Adeyemi as a little mind who “goes about discussing other people, instead of issues of development.”

On the book, which he confessed he had not read, the governor said: “In this book, though I have not seen or read it, I think the caption points to something, and that is the tenacity and never-dying spirit that Aba exudes, represents and reflects. That encapsulates the personality of Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe.”

Ikpeazu, in the message his Chief Press Secretary, Onyebuchi Ememanka, sent to the Abaribe, said: “Senator Abaribe’s life has become synonymous with service to our people, built on solid principles and sustained by the power of courage.”

MEANWHILE, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the South East, yesterday, gave Adeyemi seven days to publicly apologise to Ikpeazu for the uncomplimentary remarks against him.

The party said Adeyemi’s failure to abide by the ultimatum would leave it with no other option than taking every necessary measure to seek redress, including but not limited to instituting a libel suit, against him.

In a statement signed by the Zonal Publicity Secretary, Augustine Okeke, aftera meeting in Enugu, the PDP wondered why the senator, “a non-indigene and non-resident, who arguably owns no property or investment in any part or territory of Abia, could resort to such untoward and derogatory language to qualify a citizen of Nigeria, not less a governor of a state elected not once but twice by the indigenes and residents of Abia.

It argued that it would have been understandable, albeit inexcusable, “if there were any iota of truth in the allegations that Adeyemi levelled against Ikpeazu.