BY SUNNY A. DAVID
Some journalists in Anambra State with other election observers from Abuja on Saturday narrowly escaped death in the hands of some Okija youths in Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State.
The journalists, Afam Aminu Chimezie, Onitsha correspondent of Business News Newspaper, Gloria Anaeze -Onitsha Correspondent of Daily Independent Newspaper, Eche Nwaobasi also of Daily Independent Newspaper and Onitsha Correspondent of Anambra State owned Newspaper, National Light had travelled to Okija, the home town of the AAC Governorship Candidate, Akachukwu Nwamkpo on election monitoring.
Our correspondent gathered that after the Journalists and the visiting election observers met with Nze Nwamkpo to ascertain the state of things in his area, the media crew decided to visit some of the polling centres in the town where they also discovered that election materials arrived late about 1:15pm at Okija Central School, the team of journalists and three election observers comprising two men and a woman decided to visit one of the illustrious sons of the Community, Chief Dr. Daniel Chukwudozie who was said to be away from the Community.
However, on returning from Dr. Chukwudozie’s house be occupants of the car to disembark.
The hoodlums numbering about twenty in number in their bid to exploit the journalists, demanded N100,000 thousand as their own portion of the national cake.They also accused the journalists and election observers of carrying huge sums of money meant for distribution to party agents.
Despite pleading that they are pressmen covering the election and had no money to distribute to anybody, the hoodlums allegedly demanded for the handsets even bandits snatched some money belonging to the journalists and the election observers.
However, after accusing the team of belonging to political parties in which the journalists humbly denied, the youths opened the booth of the car the tesm were traveling in and brought out a gallon of fuel which had earlier been purchased for the car threatening to burn down the car alongside the occupants after failing to force the team back into the hoodlums’s standby car.
It was, however, after much pleadings from the journalists that lost their personal belongings including handsets and some undisclosed sum of money from the visiting team that they were allowed to go and warned never to come back to the Community again.
When the team of pressmen and election observers drove back to the house of Chief Nwamkpo, a Candidate and indigene of the Community, he asked the team to leave the Community immediately as nobody was happy with the situation on ground.
The team visited the Okija Police Divisional Headquarters to lodge a complaint over their ugly experience, they said there was no Police Officer on ground to attend to them even as they called on the police authorities to properly investigate the matter.
When our correspondent contacted the Zonal Police Public Realtions Officer, DSP Nkiruka Nwode who is in charge of the Police in media coverage for confirmation of the story, she simply said it is not true as she declined to speak more on the said incident.
