Apressure group from Imo State, Imo Interest Group on Friday announced plans to begin a campaign aimed at sensitising indigenes and voters in Imo State to vote out the state governor, Ikedi Ohakim, in the April 2011 governorship election in the state.

In a statement issued on Friday in Abuja and signed by Barrister Uchenna Nwachukwu, the group’s co-coordinator, they said their grouse with Governor Ohakim is his non-performance in office.

The group said they were angry that despite the fact that the state governor has nothing to show for his four years stay in office, the governor is now using religion in his bid to win a second term in office.

The group condemned in its entirety the upsurge in the politicisation of religion in the state by Governor Ohakim.

They bemoaned what they called the use of money to lure some priests and members of the clergy in Okigwe as reported in a national newspaper.

The group commend-ed the men of God for rejecting the Greek gift, “because the strange offer from Ohakim connoted a bizarre effort to silence the priests in the face of rising tyranny, oppression and misrule in Imo State.”

The group also took a swipe at one of the gover-nor’s men who was reported to have offered a priest N1 million after he tricked the religious men/women into coming for a meeting in his house in Mbano.

Expressing anger over the entire episode which took place in the state recently, the group said: “Imagine the mockery and mischief that would have brought to the church leaders in the state and to the entire Christendom had the priests accepted the money.

The Imo Interest Group, in the press statement, condemned the level of desperation to win the Catholic Church by all means as exhibited in the announcement of Viola Onwuliri, a professor and wife of a knight of the Catholic Church, as his running mates in the April governorship election in the state.

Onwuliri, from Ahiazu Mbaise LGA replaced Ada Okwuonu, the deputy governor and an Anglican from Aboh- Mbaise.

Coming at a time the governor was not known to have had any problem with his deputy, Ada Okwuonu, a member of the Anglican Church , the group said “the choice of Onwuliri is widely believed to be an act of desperation which has the potency of pitching a section of the state against another.

http://tribune.com.ng/sun/index.php/news/3221-imo-group-begins-campaign-against-ohakims-re-election-