ONDO ELECTION: Oke reports Fashola, Fayemi to Buhari

The governorship candidate of the Alliance for Democracy, AD, in the forthcoming election in Ondo, Olusola Oke, has appealed to President Muhammadu Buhari to call some of ministers and state governors to order over an alleged plot to stop him from contesting.

Oke, represented at a press briefing in Akure by the Director General of his campaign organisation, Bola Ilori, fingered the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, the Minister of Solid Minerals, Kayode Fayemi, Ogun State Governor, Ibikunle Amosun and his Kaduna counterpart in the plot.

According to him, they are doing all they can to stop him so as to pave the way for the candidate of the All Progressives Congress, APC, Rotimi Akeredolu.

Ilori said: “The plan of these people is to prevent Olusola Oke from contesting the election because their candidate, Akeredolu, is not in contention, having lost relevance with the people. Thus, they have resorted to lots of underhand tactics to stop him.

“We are aware of the pedigree of President Buhari, his uprightness and his zero tolerance to dirty tricks to get advantage of people, even against his avowed antagonists, but this cabal is using the paraphernalia of the Federal Government with impunity to get unsavoury advantage, thus tainting his good work.

According to Ilori, the people he referred to as the cabal are afraid of the growing popularity of Oke and the fact that Akeredolu is lagging behind in the build up to the election.

The Oke Campaign further alleged that the group has also fruitlessly tried to compromise the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, in Ondo State leading to recent media altercation between APC and INEC.

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According to him, “they have surreptitiously instigated the Legal Adviser of the Alliance for Democracy, a man who is not a candidate in the Ondo State election, to institute a suit in the court. While we are not against this action since it is the fundamental right of anybody to resort to the court as an arbiter, but we have credible information from a meeting held by this cabal last week in Abuja”.

Ilori alleged that there were also boasts that they would ensure that the Judge who will sit on the matter would be compromised to give ex-exparte injunction against Chief Olusola Oke.

“When you accuse judges as being corrupt and you did indeed move against some of them, isn’t it an irony that members of the same government are the ones boasting of compromising a Judge that would sit on the matter in Court? Such, Your Excellency, is the desperation of this cabal who are hell-bent on tainting your administration’s reputation.”, Ilori said.

“Chief Olusola Oke has been severally investigated and cleared by the anti-graft agency of any financial impropriety, but of recent, they have been putting a lot of pressure on the Commission to harass him of late with a view to making him look as if he is guilty, a development which is far from the truth.

“But we are abreast of their tricks, which will continue to fail. We want to express our absolute confidence that he has nothing to fear from any anti-graft agencies, having left office on a clean slate 12 years ago and having been cleared severally too”, Ilori stated.
By Timothy Enietan-Matthews….

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