The South-West Chairman of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Dr. Eddy Olafeso, has described as preposterous and selfish the statement credited to the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, that the people of the South-West should vote for President Muhammadu Buhari in the 2019 elections to guarantee a return of power to the region in 2023. Olafeso’s position emerged same day the Director General of the Voice of Nigeria (VON), Osita Okechukwu, described as a wake-up call to Ndigbo, the statement credited to Fashola that Yoruba’s should vote President Buhuri in 2019. Fashola had Thursday at a special town hall meeting on infrastructure organised by the Ministry of Information and Culture and the National Orientation Agency, urged the South-West people to vote for Buhari in 2023. But reacting in a chat with Saturday Telegraph, Olafeso said the statement from the former Lagos State governor smacks of nothing but the ignorance and self-centeredness of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
He said: “Its now clear to all that they are only looking for power and not the development of their people. If I ask you, what specific project can you point at that the Federal Government has done in Lagos? “I feel so disappointed that a first-class governor who suddenly turned out to be a third class minister issuing vituperations and a mundane statement that has no place in reality in terms of developing the people. “It’s a shame.
They are not representing the Yoruba nation, they are representing themselves. He is talking to himself and his group. Of what use is Buhari to the South West that they are waiting for another four years for Buhari to be voted in and they continue their mediocre journey to the extinction of the nation. “Can’t you see the real and present danger about the country? Nobody is going to wait for them. He is only saying that Yoruba should wait in vain in penury and misery for another four years before they can acquire power. Do they want to rule over dead people? Everyday counts in developing a nation.” Olafeso, who is a National Vice-Chairman of the PDP, noted further that, “But I want to announce to them that those times are gone. No matter what they do now, people have seen far beyond them and they have seen that they have cornered the wealth of Lagos State and the country. “This is the tragedy that has befallen the Bola Tinubu dynasty of which Fashola is a principal beneficiary. They are only interested in their pockets, they are interested in enslaving their own people and in naked power for themselves; they want to be emperor. “Fashola has failed himself and the Yoruba race. The people are crying over the free fall of the economy, the insecurity is there and someone wants that same government for another four years, it won’t happen.”
Meanwhile, Okechukwu in a statement issued in Enugu yesterday, while reacting to Fashola’s statement, said the former governor was indirectly telling Ndigbo to wake-up and to vote for President Buhari, so that Ndigbo would succeed the President based on equity and zoning arrangement. The VON DG maintained that every other presidential candidate from the North can only pledge or promise four years. He said Fashola’s call for South-West to vote for Buhari was not out of place, for politics is local. “The truism is that Fashola has sounded a wake-up call
if we are interested in president of Nigeria of Igbo extraction come 2023. Ndigbo has three advantages to clinch the 2023 presidency- equity, natural justice and good conscience. “The zoning convention favours Ndigbo for our two brothers in the southern belt – South West and South-South had benefited for eight and six years respectively. South-East is the only geopolitical zone that had not benefited from the zoning convention since 1999,” he said. Okechukwu, therefore, appealed to Ndigbo to rethink and strategise to harvest the zoning convention, by voting for Buhari, noting that political contest is earned, but not dashed. “Methinks this is what Fashola is saying,” he said.
