By Musa Tanimu Nasidi
The Kogi State All Progressive Congress presidential campaign council has mocked the Presidential candidate of PDP, Atiku Abubakar, who said the former Vice President was deceived by its party with the rented crowd and failed politicians to last week’s Saturday Campaign in Lokoja, Kogi capital.
The APC PCC further described last Saturday’s presidential campaign rally of the people’s Democratic Party, PDP as an assemblage of “expired politicians and lecture theatre crowd” that would not win the state for the party.
Director of Media and Publicity, Kogi State APC Campaign Council, Mr Kingsley Fanwo who stated this in a press conference on behalf of the campaign council said that the presidential campaign train of PDP and that of the Labour Party had misjudged their appeals to Nigerian citizens.
“The umbrella circus did not need anyone to tell them that Kogi people have rejected them”.
Fanwo said that the confluence stadium venue of the rally was populated by expired politicians whom the people of the state have rejected.
“Even though they bused in supporters from outside the state to beef up appearances, the modest crowd was eloquent enough. Crafty camera angles could not hide yawning gaps in the stands and it was painfully obvious that the former ruling party had been fittingly reduced to a shadow of itself in Kogi State over the last 7 years.
“What they said would be an overflow rally that would bring our city to a standstill for the day barely registered on the radar of hardworking Kogites. The innocents who did turn out for them in the vain hope of hearing anything which might persuade them to reevaluate their poor opinion of the PDP left reinforced in their disdain for people whose stint in government brought their state, nay, country, to their knees.
“Even their diehard members who came in expectations of the usual largesse associated with the party in her heydays became dispirited when the lies started. The rest of our people went about their normal businesses, utterly disinterested in the hollow antics of a party that once wasted 13 precious years for them”.
“Dismayed by the poor turnout, the PDP resorted to theatrics. It rolled out expired individuals who had been expunged from the ranks of the APC for their unsavoury deeds and characters and proceeded to canonise them. The rally turned into a farce when people like the former Deputy Governor of the State, Elder Simeon Achuba and the former speaker of the state assembly, Rt Hon. Alfa Imam was repackaged for Atiku as Kogi APC stalwarts who were decamping to the PDP at the rally”. He said.
“What Atiku and his entourage might not have known is that this is the same Achuba who was impeached from office with ignominy by the state assembly for gross misconduct during the first term of the administration. He rejoined his former bedmates in the PDP ahead of the 2019 general elections and failed to deliver even his own Ward in that year’s presidential, legislative and gubernatorial elections.
“Rt Hon. Alfa Imam is another has-been whose poor leadership pitched him in a running battle with his colleagues when he was Speaker of the State House of Assembly. At the cusp of being impeached, he pleaded to be allowed to resign. He was obliged and he too left office and our party in 2019.
Shortly he decamped to the SDP, another rickety platform in Kogi State where his presence was as ineffectual as his departure was unfelt in the APC. We won the 2019 landslide without them. Since then, the two men have failed in their political self-delusions and have continued to fail.
“It soon became clear that the political jesters in Kogi PDP had deliberately lied to their Dubai-based Presidential Candidate and his hangers-on that all projects in Kogi State were done by them, so the poor man spent his time on the podium attributing the massive projects constructed by Yahaya Bello, either to a man who left office over one decade before construction started on them or to the PDP Administration in which he used to be number two.
“Even the pitiable sight of the immediate past PDP Governor of Kogi State craving for some level of attention did not dissuade the PDP from treating his tenure as if it never happened. Indeed, there may have been a method to their madness, for in reality, if one were to judge dispassionately, his tenure, like the one before it, cannot boast of any visible contribution to the wellbeing of the people, so it might as well never have happened.”
The APC thereby urged Kogites to ignore Atiku’s promise of revamping Ajaokuta Steel, said the former Vice President was instrumental to the bizarre manner the steel company was privatised leading to its comatose.
