APC & PDP In War Of Words Over Saraki, Dogara, Others

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) got a reply to its threat to boycott next year’s elections from the ruling party yesterday.

"You are being hunted by your past", All Progressives Congress (APC) National Chairman Adams Oshiomhole told the main opposition party.

The PDP fired back, saying APC was jittery over their coalition.

Senate President Bukola Saraki and House Speaker Yakubu Dogara and others are believed to be on their way to the PDP, but the APC is urging them to stay.

Oshiomhole said the PDP was being haunted by its past treatment of electoral contests as a do-or-die affair, adding that the APC will not be intimidated by any threat of the PDP or any other party as it was committed to the sustenance of democracy and the sanctity of one man, one vote.

The APC Chairman, who spoke when he received the report of the Osun State governorship primary from the chairman of the primary election panel and Zamfara State Governor, Abdulaziz Yari, stressed that if the APC could defeat the PDP while it still held power in 2015, it can repeat the feat now that PDP is out of office and divided.

He described the move by the PDP as akin to that of “a rabbit jumping out of a hole in the afternoon because a hunter has come to put fire to smoke it out”.

He said: “Our message to PDP is clear. Your Excellency, you come from the opposition party in the past, I also come from an opposition party and we knew that we didn’t have a rigging machine. The only thing we had was instrument of persuasion, mobilisation, explaining to people, convincing people and aligning with them and understanding that democracy was with the people at the grassroots.

“But those who have lived on rigging machines, the one we call ward 16, they are based in Abuja and their only access is where electronics and papers exist. Those ones at old age they can’t possibly learn new tricks and they can’t master the dialogue of electioneering, which is why they got stuck in Ekiti and l am sure they would be flat in Osun.”

Reacting to the threat by the PDP National Chairman, Uche Secondus, who said his party may quit the election over the manipulation of the electoral process, Oshiomhole said: “Let me also use this opportunity to comment on what l read about the PDP chairman. I heard threatening that they may boycott 2019 general elections. When a rabbit in the afternoon jumps out of its hole, not because the hunter has come to smoke it out and it is running, you will know that it has already seen its end.

"The truth is that we are not desperate; we have worked hard to defeat PDP while they were in power, when they had no faction, when all the founding fathers and founding mothers were in the same house.

“Nigerian people rejected them on account of 16 years of absolute missrule at the peak of our property as a nation. When oil sold for a $140 per barrel and we came in when oil price had dropped. If with all those huge revenue that accrued to them people complained of bad roads whether from the South to East from the North to the West, they have nothing new to offer to the Nigerian people.

“I think they are hunted by their own ghost and this is because they had perpetrated a do-or-die politics and they are on records that election matters are do-or-die affairs. One of their old men was recorded as saying that they perfected the language of rigging them out, ‘let them go to court’.

“Now rigging machines have been dismantled and their problem is how they can survive without it. The glue that held them together, which was cheap money from treasury, again that has been cut off and what they already have, like a typical village sheep, they were chewing it all day all night. Now after three and half years, it almost seems that they have finished all; they have taken and now they are worried.”

Also yesterday, APC National Publicity Secretary Bolaji Abdullahi said in a statement: “After three years in the wilderness, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is understandably excited with possibility of hiding its irredeemably bad image under the heap of a new coalition.

“Like the vulture, PDP sees every altercation as a potential opportunity for a feast. If PDP is not alleging wild conspiracies, they are threatening to boycott elections or announcing fake defections. What is clear with all these is that no matter how long a leopard lives, it cannot change its spots.

“What President Muhammadu Buhari and Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, the National Chairman of our Party are doing, persuading every aggrieved member not to leave the party, is what responsible and sensible party leaders would do. Party politics is a game of number. And that game is addition.

“If the PDP had the same presence of mind in 2015, perhaps the calamity that befell them would have been averted. We challenge the PDP to face Nigerians on their own merit in 2019 and stop shopping around for supporters.”

culled from Olu famous Mr Olumide's Blog