Samuel Alonge
The crisis in the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Ondo State is yet to abate. Indeed, as the 2020 governorship race moves closer, the party may be in for a greater challenge; that of a cohesive house.
This is because a faction of the party has decided to officially unveil its preferred candidate, Mr. Ife Oyedele, who will challenge Governor Rotimi Akeredolu for the party’s ticket in the governorship race.
Oyedele is an electrical engineer from Okitipupa in Ondo South Senatorial District and currently the Executive Director, Engineering and Technical Services, at the Niger Delta Power Holding Company Limited, NDPHC.
The faction rooting for Oyedele is believed to be loyal to the national leader of the party, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, whose cold war with Akeredolu is said to still subsist.
A top source in the APC revealed that the NDPHC top shot may eventually steal the show for the fact that he is a long-standing political associate of President Muhammadu Buhari and has also in the last three years, been instrumental to the restoration of power supply to many rural communities that had spent many years in the dark, across the state.
He was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Congress for Progressive Change, CPC, the party of Buhari that morphed into the APC in 2013.
It was gathered that Oyedele had missed the chances of becoming a minister twice, owing to what sources called his unassuming nature when it comes to lobbying.
In 2015, he had topped the list as ministerial hopeful in Ondo State but at the last minute, former Osun State governor, Chief Bisi Akande, reportedly recommended his bosom friend, Mr. Omoyele Daramola, and President Buhari, it was gathered, buckled, for the regards he had for Akande.
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Again, during the last ministerial selection, Oyedele’s name featured, this time through the Tinubu faction. But the President finally picked Senator Tayo Alasoadura, who was nominated by Governor Akeredolu.
Sources within the APC revealed that the president’s refusal to pick Oyedele, as minister this time round was just a decoy, as he is “in the Presidency’s political fattening room” to emerge as the proverbial dark horse, primed to take the party’s ticket from Akeredolu.
The governor, it was gathered, had been booked for what sources described as his anti-party activities that led to the defeat of President Buhari in Ondo State during the last general elections.
Then, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, challenger, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar not only defeated Buhari in the state, the PDP beat the APC to produce two out of the state’s three senators and to get a haul in the House of Representatives.
At the election period, Akeredolu reportedly dusted up another party – the Action Alliance, AA, upon realising that the Tinubu faction had succeeded through the Adams Oshiomhole-led national leadership of the party to outwit his preferred candidates for the National Assembly elections.
Though Akeredolu reportedly helped his floored candidates to get the AA ticket, the tiff spilled the milk for both the APC and the AA, as the PDP reaped immensely from the discord.
How to unveil Oyedele
With the Kogi and Bayelsa governorship elections over last week, all eyes will be on Ondo State. A top source in the APC told The Nigerian Express correspondent that a meeting was recently held at the Presidential Villa in Abuja, involving a presidential representative, Tinubu, and Oyedele, where the action plan to unveil Oyedele was drawn up.
It was gathered that Oyedele had been programmed to emerge the same way the current Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwo Olu was made to defeat former Governor Akinwumi Ambode, to pick the APC ticket.
However, a group known as Change Agent Foundation International, CAFI, had been sent from Lagos to the state a few months ago, purportedly to whittle down or at best, eliminate whatever popularity Akeredolu might have gathered in the last three years.
The group, headed by Mr. Dipo Okeyomi, popularly known as Carry Go, and an indigene of Ikare-Akoko in the Akoko North-East Local Government Area, has since been active at the grassroots, helping the locals to the tantrum of ‘Aketi, O to Ge’ (Akeredolu, Enough is Enough).
Speaking with The Nigerian Express few months ago, Okeyomi, who is also a Lagos-based politician, said, “Akeredolu cannot run for another term because he did all he could to destroy the party during the last general election.
“So, this led to his suspension and his new party is the AA, while the APC will shop for a governorship material for 2020.”
Okeyomi further averred that the governor had virtually nothing to show for his first tenure in office despite that he had barely a year and a few months to complete the tenure.
According to him, Akeredolu is fighting many wars at the same time, thus distracting him from being able to successfully implement any of the party’s development policies.
“He is fighting with Asiwaju Tinubu; he is not cordial with President Buhari, and he is not in good terms with many APC leaders across the state,” Okeyomi claimed.
But in a swift reaction, the APC chairman in the state, Mr. Ade Adetimehin, dismissed CAFI as “an unknown group within the party.”
He added: “It is not also true that the governor is fighting with Asiwaju Tinubu or President Buhari, as we can evidently see the cordiality between him and these personalities at many public functions.
“As for the APC state leaders being referred, they are only talking of people who could not secure political appointments within the party, and the governor has been going round to talk to them, assuring them that political appointments will still go round; that they should be patient. And they are showing understanding.”
Adetimehin particularly sneered at the CAFI for saying Akeredolu lacked achievements. “They should go round the state and see the way this administration has transformed virtually everywhere, especially the rural communities,” he riposted.
Governor’s alleged ill-health
The social media have been particularly abuzz in the last two months with reports that Akeredolu’s health is in tenterhooks, thus helping to weaken the governor’s second-term aspiration’s profile.
It was alleged that the governor might have been poisoned sometime ago, which led to his hurried embarkation on official leave that saw him jetting out of the country. Some reports claimed that he went for urgent medical attention to arrest an abdominal seizure, precipitated by the alleged poisoning.
Further to the allegation, Akeredolu could not be treated abroad as the medics urged his care-givers to seek “home-grown solution”, and was thus flown back to the country.
But ever since the governor arrived in the country, he had stayed put in Abuja for upwards of three weeks, thus fuelling another speculation that he was being treated in a native herbal home run by a certain marabout.
But putting a lie to the ill-health allegation, the state government came up with a statement to claim that the governor was hale and hearty.
It noted that although the governor went on leave and travel abroad, his long stay in Abuja following his return was only to attend to some official matters that were sequential and would involve regular travels.
The statement issued by the governor’s Senior Special Assistant on Media, Mr. Oyewamide Ojo, noted, inter alia: “It has become pertinent to alert the general public that…conveyors of blackmail and lies are at it again.
“This time round, they intend to shun out a fresh angle that Governor Akeredolu, in their imagination, is in a herbal home.
“This untoward plot is coming less than 48 hours after Governor Akeredolu, in the full glare of the media, presided over the signing of an MoU between the Ondo State Government and a German medical giant, Medicus International, to establish a world class Sunshine Medical City in Akure, the state capital. Not only did he preside over proceedings, he granted a post-event interview.
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“It, therefore, becomes not just suspicious but shamelessly preposterous, that some persons would hide under the cover of balancing a ‘packaged’ story to disseminate outright lies.
“No doubt, these are marked acts aimed at distracting the Governor. They are not without motives of unclear purports; but Governor Akeredolu will not be distracted.”
But concerns also heightened two weeks ago, when amid the ill-health speculation, the state’s Commissioner for Information, Mr. Donald Ojogo, issued a directive that the governor’s Special Assistant on Political Matters, Mr. Augustine Pelemo, had been sacked with immediate effect.
Pelemo’s offence, it was gathered, is that he described the wife of the deputy governor as “the Acting First Lady of Ondo State”, while congratulating the woman on her birthday, on the Facebook.
The sack, observers say, is an indication that all is not well in the Government House. Since Akeredolu’s absence in the state for upwards of two months, his deputy, Mr. Agboola Ajayi, has been acting as governor.
