National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, has said the three governors opposed to his conduct of party primaries in their states were behaving like drug addicts suffering from ‘withdrawal symptoms.’
Amosun, Okorocha and Yari Chief of Staff to Imo State governor, Uche Nwosu, swiftly described the national chairman as a double-faced progressive who was merely thriving in ignorance. Similarly, Governor Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State said Oshiomhole was foisting a broad-day electoral heist on the country.
Vanguard recalls that Oshiomhole has for days, been having a running battle with governors Ibikunle Amosun of Ogun State; Rochas Okorocha of Imo and Abdulaziz Yari of Zamfara State, over the position of the national chairman on the outcome of the APC primaries in their respective states.
Speaking with journalists, weekend in Abuja, Oshiomhole said the action of the governors was akin to drug addicts suddenly jolted by the new reality of a lack of access to drugs and who now suffer from withdrawal symptoms. He said: “At the heart of this challenge is the trauma of going through change. If you know of any addict, such as those who are addicted to alcohol or to drugs, there is what we call ‘withdrawal symptom’ when they cannot see it (drugs) and you try to stop them from that habit they have been addicted to.
“Now, Nigerians are worried that we can have a democracy in which only a few kingpins dominate the polity and that party membership does not carry any weight. It is the so-called godfathers that anoint. You hear of the anointed. “You hear of godfather imposition. Now, my task as national chairman is to strenuously work to steer everything away from this heinous past which the PDP created, so it can be membership driven.
“Those who have survived so far, courtesy of this kind of impunity, imposition, creating dynasties from their own privileged position to accept the logic of participatory democracy, or bottom-up approach, because nothing explains the frustration of these people, very few people, by the fact that they cannot understand how in a primary, whether direct or indirect, that the vote of a governor is only one and the vote of a sweeper in the governor’s office or alakara (bean cake seller) who is a member of the APC, is also one. ‘’They cannot reconcile themselves with this reality. So, if you have 200 alakara, 300 sweepers voting for a candidate and you have one governor, two commissioners, five special advisers voting for another, the logic of our own preferred democracy is that this army of sweepers will defeat these powerful governors. ‘’
So, they are not able to accept this ultimate logic of people-driven, people-based democracy and what I have simply done is to insist that having cautiously chosen change as our slogan, that change must begin with us. ‘’It must be reflected in what we do, how we do it and we should learn however frustrating, to reconcile ourselves with the reality that we are in a democracy.’’
Source: https://www.vanguardngr.com
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