Former secretary to Akwa Ibom State Government, Obong Umana Umana has refuted the allegation that he was offered the position of the managing director of Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) as a compensation not to con­test the next governorship election of the state.
Speaking with Daily Sun on Friday, Umana, who until a year ago was assumed to be Governor Godswill Akpa­bio’s anointed successor, but was surprisingly booted out of office, said no such offer was made because for such an offer to have been valid, his name should have been submitted to the Senate.
“You cannot reject what you have not been offered in the first place. If my name was submitted to the Sen­ate for screening and I said I wasn’t interested, then you can say I rejected the MD of NDDC position. Nothing like that happened. It is just one of the blackmails they are concocting against me, but which has failed.
“The other one is the al­legation that I was so in­fluential that I stopped the governor from approving the new minimum wage for civil servants.
“Anyone who knows how government works will know that issues concern­ing the minimum wage were under the state head of civil service, who is not under the SSG but directly under the governor. Whatever the gov­ernor wants to approve, it is left to him, not the SSG,” Umana said.
He stressed that he would run for the next governorship race in the state, hinging  his confidence on  the national chairman of Peoples Demo­cratic Party (PDP)’s declara­tion that the campaign would be free and fair to all those who were not constitution­ally barred from contesting within the party.
The former SSG, who was in company with the leadership of Ibom Devel­opment Network (IDN), a socio-political pressure group campaigning for free and fair elections beginning from the party primaries, enthused that he was sure of becoming the next gov­ernor of the state because “the people have earnestly asked me to contest the next governorship election in the state.”
He slammed the town hall meetings earlier organised by the state government to gauge the people’s feelings with regard to zoning, de­scribing them as a charade, which only intention was “to sell the ambition of one person and demonise the other person.
“If the town hall meeting was meant to address issues of development in the state, then government could have provided the people with information on how much revenue has come to the state so far, or the debt profile of the present ad­ministration. Governor Vic­tor Attah’s administration did that.”
He praised the former governor for not intimidat­ing the present governor when he (Akpabio) de­clared his intention to con­test the governorship even though Attah did not sup­port Akpabio.
Umana, however, regret­ted that the present political atmosphere, where even the state party chairman was al­legedly barred from speak­ing with other gubernatorial aspirants except the gover­nor’s anointed one, saying it was embarrassing.

I wasn’t offered MD of NDDC position –Umana