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Members and staff of Abia State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) were, yesterday, denied entry into the party secretariat in Umuahia.

This followed the presence of security operatives around the vicinity.

While one of the police officers said the order to guard the secretariat came from “above,’ the party’s state Publicity Secretary, Chief Fabian Nwankwo, said the office was closed following the declaration of yesterday and today as work and business free days by the state government.

Nwankwo stressed that the development, therefore, may not be unconnected with the need to protect the Secretariat, as aspirants troop to the guarded party office to scheme to secure the party’s tickets to contest for elective offices in the 2023 polls.

Meanwhile, on Tuesday, a group, under the aegis of ‘Concerned Abia PDP Members,’ staged a peaceful protest at the party’s office after they petitioned the party’s National Chairman Senator Abdullahi Adamu, calling for the resignation of the state Chairman, Dr. Allwell Okere.

They accused Okere of running the state party like one man’s estate, preferring to work with the party’s non-functionaries.

They, also, accused him of scheming to impose an already prepared list of three-man ad-hoc delegates and coming up with obnoxious zoning of the governorship of the state to two zones, which, they said, still causes disaffection in the party, among other accusations.

Reacting to the protest, the enlarged State Executive Committee of the party, in a statement jointly signed by 47 of them and read to journalists at the party’s Secretariat in Umuahia by the Deputy Chairman, Elder Armah Abraham, urged party members and the public to disregard the petition, describing it as frivolous, unfounded, baseless and not worth attention, even as they passed a vote of confidence on Okere.