Vice-President Namadi Sambo was quoted as saying: “We are going to war front and (to) bring back our stolen mandate; everybody knows that Ekiti belongs to PDP; they used all instruments to take it away from us…. Osun is PDP. Osun was stolen from us. The end of stealing has come.”
Although Vice- President Sambo went further to restate the federal government’s commitment to free and fair election, his earlier war threat had taken away the wind from the sail of his seemingly patriotic but reluctant words which could only sound, at best, as an after-thought or mere window-dressing.
What was loud and clear in his speech, as PDP’S campaign committee chairman, was a declaration of Ekiti and Osun states as war-fronts rather than a theatre for free and fair election; and his listeners /readers from the two states should, by now, perhaps, count themselves lucky not to have been caught unawares.
In response, the APC candidate in Ekiti State, Dr John Kayode Fayemi, has described his declaration of war as “unbecoming of a Vice-President” but he should have added: “even as a campaign committee chairman “because preparing the voters’ minds for war in Ekiti and Osun was not only outrageous but inciting and counter-productive to the spirit and intents of democracy.
Moreover, by claiming that Osun and Ekiti states had always been PDP states, Sambo was only unsuccessfully trying to twist the facts while he succeeded largely in reminding the people of the two states of the sheer nauseating brigandage which had seen the past PDP governors into office in the traditionally progressive South-west.Snatching of ballot boxes with the aid of shameless armed policemen, stuffing of such ballot boxes with thumb-printed ballot papers right in the confines of the police stations only for the obvious result to be announced to astounded, robbed voters; such were the methods of electoral conquests then and such was what the judiciary eventually reversed with its judgments in Ekiti and Osun states.
Could it be the same kind of war that Sambo had intended to wage again in Osun and Ekiti states this year, going by his words which had been spoken from the abundance of his heart? If so, would INEC, the Ekitis and Osuns be expected to simply fold their arms and allow the PDP to come and rough-ride again, using the police?
Jide Oguntoye,
Oye-Ekiti
