TRACKING___The Ondo State Governor, Rotimi Akerodolu (SAN), on Friday, said governors of the South-West will soon hold a meeting with the President, Major General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), over the “Operation Amotekun” security initiative.
Akerodolu, who is also the Chairman of the South-West Governors Forum, said this while speaking to journalists in Abuja, on Friday.
He explained that the meeting which was earlier scheduled had to be postponed because the president had to travel for official engagements in the United Kingdom.
The governor said, “We will discuss with him when we have the opportunity. I can tell you our letter was to see the President, that we wanted to see him and discuss with him but he said he was going to be in England because of time, why don’t we meet with the Vice President until he returns but by the time the Vice President asked us to come, most of our colleagues too were in the UK.
“They were coming back yesterday (Thursday) that was why he fixed the meeting for yesterday (Thursday) because a few of my colleagues who were in the UK came back, some of them, Ogun and Lagos couldn’t return but they sent their deputies.
“The President will hear us. He is a person that understands us anyway, we will explain to him when we meet.”
In response to speculations that the governors did not carry the Federal Government along before launching the initiative, he said, the governors felt that their earlier meetings with the Inspector General of Police on the matter was representative enough.
He said, “Our understanding was that if we have discussions with the Inspector General of Police, it was representative enough for the Federal Government.
“When my brother Governor, John Fayemi Kayode met and had discussions with the IGP on our behalf, he was not opposed to it but it was the reactions (which trailed Abubakar Malami’s comments) that he said ah, what are they trying to do. We just told them that the (public)reaction was to what the AGF said not to what we are doing. We were able to sort it out.”
Speaking about issues within the All Progressives Congress, Akerodolu explained that as a political party, the APC has its issues but that they were not issues that could not be resolved.
He said, “What some of us governors are saying is that we must have our party as an institution and build it on known parameters. Known, it is not that you go to one state and say go and use direct, you go to another state it is indirect, no! There must be uniformity so that everybody will know, yes, in our party we have this. When we had it in the last set of elections, it gave a lot of problems.”
