CHIEF Anabs Sara-Igbe, a chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), has dismissed as falsehood, the claim that a North/South-West conspiracy led to the defeat of President Goodluck Jonathan in the last presidential election.

Speaking with newsmen in Port Harcourt, on Monday, Sara-Igbe, a former security adviser to former Governor Peter Odili, said the same two geopolitical  zones voted for Jonathan in 2011, adding that it would be wrong to blame the two zones for the defeat of the president in 2015.

He said, rather than blaming anybody for the PDP woes, Jonathan lost the presidential election because of non-performance, adding that the president also failed to appeal to the electorate for forgiveness.

Sara-Igbe was one of the aggrieved PDP chieftains in Rivers State who vowed to ensure the defeat of the party for fielding Chief Nyesom Wike as its governorship candidate in the state, against the clamour for the choice of a Riverine candidate.

He maintained that the president and PDP would not have polled over 12 million votes if the election was free and fair in the South-South and the South-East.

“President Jonathan had a sweep of the votes in the North and the South-West in the 2011 presidential election. So, at what point did these areas in Nigeria gang up against him? The truth is that he (Jonathan) did not perform and yet he did not appeal.

“There was no gang-up against President Jonathan. He would not have got the figure he scored in 2015 presidential election if there was no rigging in the South-South and the South-East geopolitical zones,” Sara-Igbe said.

He, therefore, called on the people of the state to vote for the governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Honourable Dakuku Peterside, on Saturday, saying the South-South zone was the worst hit in the current administration.

He said President Jonathan allegedly neglected the region and refused to develop it within his six years’ reign and warned former militants not to go back to the creeks in protest against the victory of General Muhammadu Buhari in the last election.

According to him, the Buhari administration would crush militancy in the region the same way Jonathan crushed Boko Haram within six weeks.

“If some people in the South-South say they are going back to militancy, the new government will crush them. And you cannot talk because your brother (Jonathan) did it in the fight against Boko Haram,” he stressed.