BY AMUDA DAN SULAIMAN FAB
The Lokoja local government chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party on Tuesday dismissed the speech by Senator Smart Adeyemi, while welcoming some defectors from the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP to the APC yesterday, at the Township Stadium in Kabba, as an attempt to sell a rejected party to the people of Kogi State.
Adeyemi had said the defection of the PDP members to the APC was a sign that the APC had become the only party in the state and that the opposition had been finally buried.
But the PDP Publicity Secretary, Lokoja local government area, Amodu Ahmed, in a statement said the whole event and Adeyemi’s statement betrayed his fear that the PDP had put its house in order.
Ahmed said, “Our attention has been drawn to a statement credited to Senator Smart Adeyemi in some online medium at a function held to welcome defectors who have joined the APC, wherein he expressed his fears indirectly over the continuous rise and dominance of the PDP in Kogi State politics and Nigeria at large.
“It is absurd that 90 per cent of the so-called defectors have ceased to be PDP members more than two years ago while the remaining 10 per cent are politicians who make their living through politics and hence the need to be in the ruling party at all times because they lack ideologies and principles.
“The PDP in Kogi State actually pities Smart Adeyemi for the unenviable job of selling a rejected Kogi APC to the electorate, whereas the party hierarchy including the national chairman, John Odigie Oyegun, knows that the Kogi APC is moribund.”
The statement noted that the absence of key party figures like the APC Deputy chairman, Hon. Osune Shaibu, and Senator Dino Melaye, showed that the event was a failure.
“It is on record that many other political office holders on the platform of the APC boycotted the events to the surprise of Adeyemi and Governor Yahaya Bello; a failed attempt to give a false hope that the APC is still alive in the state when all the indices show that the APC is virtually dead and the undertakers were admitted with funfair.”
