By Rotimi Ojomoyela
Ado-Ekiti
The leadership of the All Progressive Congress (APC) has been described as “a group of pretenders whose activities and method of governance are strange to democratic tenets and progressive politicking.”
Governor of Ondo state and Labour Party (LP) leader, Dr Olusegun Mimiko and the party’s governorship candidate in Ekiti state, Hon. Opeyemi Bamidele, made the statement yesterday in Ikere-Ekiti at a mega rally organised by the party to drum for its governorship candidate.
Mimiko said the APC was peopled by “dictators and pseudo-democrats who ruled the states under them with deceits and lies,” adding that “nothing has been progressive in some of the policies that have allegedly unleashed unprecedented sufferings on the populace in the APC-controlled states across Nigeria.”
Bamidele, who presented his running mate, Alhaja Maryam Ogunlade, to national leaders of the party, led by its chairman, Barrister Dan Nwanyanwu, promised to make “poverty history in Ekiti, if elected.”
Leaders of the Nigeria Union of Local Government Employees (NULGE), led by its National President, Comrade Ibrahim Khaleel, endorsed Bamidele’s candidature, describing him as “the best for Ekiti governorship seat.”
Khaleel who hinged the decision of the union to support Bamidele on the fact that he picked one of their own as his running mate, an act, Khaleel described as a testimony of abiding faith in the working class.
Mimiko said: “These APC people are pretenders, but not progressives. What is progressive in a party that executes urban renewal in the states under its control and made many jobless by pulling down their places of businesses without providing alternatives? “Progressive governance is about the people and only the LP has been doing that due to the fact that we can feel the pulses of the people, because we always identify with them and put them in focus in all our programmes.
“I want to assure Ekiti electorate that should they vote for Hon Bamidele in the June 21 election, he will serve them with good conscience by fighting poverty, hunger, hike in tuition fee in the university, illiteracy and make education affordable for all categories of Ekiti indigenes.”