“ElectionBuzzNig’23
A governorship aspirant on the platform of the All Progress Congress (APC) in Oyo State, Niyi Akintola (SAN), has declared that the end has come for the APC in the state, saying the party should kiss the Government House goodbye come 2023.
The legal luminary made the remarks on Thursday, while addressing hundreds of his supporters at the Trans Amusement Park, Bodija, Ibadan, following an alleged plot to manipulate the state governorship primary to favour a particular candidate.
Akintola, who did not name the particular aspirant, noted that the list of delegates brought by the Senator Tokunbo Afikuyomi-led committee to conduct the governorship primary did not in any way reflect the list submitted earlier to the National Secretariat of the party.
Read also: Oyo APC Postpones Gubernatorial Primary Election
He explained that the congress, which was supposed to produce the delegates for the primary, should have been held the previous week but some party chairmen nationwide hijacked the congress forms, making the party to cancel the forms and order the congress to sell new forms to all the members who would become the delegates to vote at the primary.
He stated: “When our own congress committee came to Oyo state, I was the one who raised the subject and the chairman of the committee admitted and said it was a mistake that they didn’t announce it publicly, if that was what they had come for.
“He said the forms would later be sold at a particular day and we were asked to produce our teller and evidence of payment for the delegates and we did and when we asked for the form he asked us to come back the following day,” Akintola revealed.
He noted that the committee did nothing, but said they were auditing the forms, until later when he (Akintola) lodged a complaint, with evidences, with the party national leadership and then sales of the forms began. However, only him (Akintola) and Bayo Adelabu (another governorship aspirant), who had paid the previous day, turned up for the purchase of the forms and he (Akintola) got 400 forms for the state delegates only.
“We completed the forms and submitted based on the people who were elected from the local governments. Now we want to ask, from which forms did the names of the delegates on the list brought from Abuja emanate? Those were the questions they could not answer. Of course, you cannot lay the blame on this committee because they were not the ones who compiled the list,” Akintola lamented.
He disclosed that they demanded to see the delegates list before the primary could commence but were apologetically asked to return by 1pm and were not attended to till 2pm. However, on seeing the list, they discovered it did not reflect the forms they filled and submitted, saying he saw the name of someone who was both a local government and state delegate on the list.
The aspirant noted: “I’m wondering where those names emanated from. Not only that, for governorship primary, we are making use of only 32 constituencies and we have 33 local governments. In Oyo State, some local governments were collapsed to form one constituency but when we saw the list that was brought, there were names from local governments that were supposed to have been collapsed into one.”
The enraged Akintola asserted that with the development, he could only wish the APC good luck, saying it is the beginning of the end for the party in the state.
Emmanuel Ukoh
