CHIEF ODIGIE OYEGUN AND THE AXIS OF EVIL
The Oasis Reporters
May 8, 2018
If the All Progressive Congress (APC) were to be a human being it would be right to describe it as a terminally old patient that for all intents and purposes has but a short time to live. This patient has been diagnosed with chronic liver cirrhosis, diabetes and heart related ailments. This sick patient can though save itself from itself and by implications sudden death if the prescribed drugs are well administered.
It had been long foretold that the current fate of the APC will not be any different from that of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) before it. This prediction is coming true if the current crises of confidence is anything to go by. The APC has fallen victim to a cartel of political buccaneers at the head of which is Chief Odigie Oyegun the APC Chairman. Chief Oyegun’s democratic credentials are questionable.
It is quite a tragedy that this character is at the head of the party of change. Nothing has changed about Chief Oyegun because even at his age I am told he will be willing to enter into a boxing ring with an opponent three times younger so long as a few pennies are to be earned but at what cost?
Oyegun’s leadership style as Chairman of the APC has conclusively proven that this man is always at the ready to trade our cherished values of democracy for a few coins. I thought that the responsibility of a party chieftain will include taking steps to reconcile aggrieved party members and reconciling one to another. He failed abysmally to do any of these, rather he chose to pitch his tent with some APC governors who are still hell bent on perpetuating themselves in office and by extension in power.
Chief Oyegun is not in the least concerned with what fate awaits the APC which he is heading. He is blind to the interest of the millions who toiled under the hot sun and under the rains to vote the APC to power. Other members of this axis of evil include the dictator of Kaduna State, the brute of a governor in troubled Kogi and the bearded fox in Edo State.
This axis of evil are all agreed on one thing which is to truncate the democratic process in Nigeria. The trio have Chief Odigie Oyegun as their arrowhead and he has justified the humongous amounts they have consistently been channelling to his bottomless pockets. This is why this man and other members of the corrupt leadership of the APC in Abuja have not had the nerve to consider the complaints/ petitions gathering dust in their offices. For the dictator of Kaduna State, he believes that the humongous amounts spent at the APC national headquarters can pay for whatever services he is pursuant to particularly removing any possible obstacles to his remaining in Sir Kashim Ibrahim House in 2019.
The strategy is simple and anchored on tenure elongation for the leadership of the APC at the National Headquarters of the party and by extension in the States. The cartel at the head of this conspiracy almost got away with blue murder before Baba Buhari had a rethink. When this gang was told pointedly that the tenure elongation plot would not fly because of the legal implications for the party the conspirators were back in their laboratory where they came up with the affirmation theory. Again they were overruled and told in no uncertain terms that their tenure had expired and that Ward Congresses had to hold. Chief Odigie Oyegun was on hand to appoint the governor of Kaduna State as a member of the planning committee. As far as Oyegun is concerned for almost all committees the dictator of. Kaduna State must be a member. It is his membership of the Ward Congresses planning committee that provided the unique opportunity for the committee to plant mines in all the processes of the Ward Congresses. The dictator had simply had his boys draw up the names of his favoured candidates to be affirmed and forwarded to Abuja as the outcome of the Ward Congresses. The Ward Congresses were planned to fail because the plan included the requirement to very deliberately frustrate certain members of the APC but most importantly to deny the electorate the opportunity to take part in the electioneering process.
In Kaduna State it was news that the officials to conduct the Ward Congresses were in town barely 4 days Saturday 5 May 2018. Even at that, the officials took time to perfect their dubious agenda with the dictator on how to bungle the exercise. The opposition in compliance with the laid down instructions paid for the Forms into the designated accounts with the equally designated banks for the about 9,000 candidates on Friday 4 May 2018 but the forms were not available. Up to 0200 hrs Saturday morning the Forms were not still available. It is now being confirmed that the Forms were hijacked by the dictator or his agents just to frustrate the candidates of the opposition. It is further confirmed that Forms for only about 3 of the 23 local government areas were brought to Kaduna State therefore photocopies had to be produced. The INEC officials deliberately undermined the Ward Congresses in Kaduna State. In most Wards no election was held and whatever names are forwarded as the outcome of the Ward Congresses is a huge fraud and a joke.
The Nation Newspaper of 7 May 2018 carried a report credited to the National Publicity Secretary of the APC Mallam. Bolaji Abdullahi in which he was expressing satisfaction with the conduct of the Ward Congresses. He went on to describe the exercise as successful while urging any aggrieved parties to take such grievances to the appeals committees set up by the the APC. I have not met Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi before but from his comments with regard to the monumental farce called the APC Ward Congresses of 5 May 2018, Mallam Abdullahi does cut the image of a comedian much in the manner of Baba Sala.
It is deeply intriguing that in the face of the disappointing manner the Congresses were said to have been conducted, Mallam Abdullahi will gleefully be seen and heard to have made the comments attributed to him. I was prepared to vote in the Ward Congress election in the Sabo Tasha Ward but no INEC officials showed up. I visited other Wards in Chukun LGA and the report was the same.
If the INEC officials deliberately failed to show up at the venues for the elections how in heavens name could any election have taken place?
Close as Kaduna State is from Abuja yet election materials could not be moved in good time for the elections.
How then did the same materials get to far away Lagos and other States far away from Abuja?
Proving the allegation of a conspiracy against Chief Oyegun and other conspirators why was Mallam Abdullahi in so much of a hurry to comment so early on the outcome of an obviously bungled Ward Congresses?
What justice is there to expect from the appeals committee Mallam Abdullahi is referring to when genuine complaints earlier forwarded to the National headquarters of the APC were simply swept under the carpet by Chief Oyegun and his co-travellers?
If justice must be said and seen to be done it is for the officials of INEC to prove that Ward Congresses election did actually take place. Without a second guess you can bet that the names INEC officials would have submitted as the outcome of the Ward Congresses in Kaduna State will be the same as those earlier pencilled down in Sir Kashim Ibrahim House.
Where then is the justice when very clearly the electorate were duped and disenfranchised?
In the face of this fraud, it is clear that some of the electoral criminals are bent on taking Nigeria’s democracy back in time. President Buhari must act swiftly to get our democracy back on track. The farce that passed for the APC Ward Congresses in Kaduna and elsewhere clearly makes a mockery of the defeat of the tenure elongation saga. Very clearly, what the proponents of the tenure elongation sought to achieve by the door, they have achieved by manipulating the Ward Congresses to achieve the same results through the window.
I expect that President Buhari should have known that our democracy has been a victim of serial rape by the Chief Odigie Oyegun gang. Shamelessly, this same character was guest of the dictator of Kaduna State on 4 May 2018 at the Ranchers Bees Stadium to present flags to APC Government House Faction contestants in the Local Council polls which will not produce a result any different from the Ward Congress election that was a complete sham.
If Chief Odigie Oyegun had any honour left in him at all, it departed from him when he stood by and even danced while the dictator was spewing his madness insulting the persons of the three distinguished Senators representing Kaduna State for frustrating a World Bank loan. Such uncouth behaviour has been typical of the impish dictator and so not many people in Kaduna State and elsewhere are in the least surprised. The impish dictator has elevated himself to the position of ” Master of Hate Speech “. The inanities that came forth from the dictator’s mouth could only possibly have come from the lips of a patient from the Federal Neuro-Psychiatric facility here in Kaduna or elsewhere.
My final appeal is for President Muhammadu Buhari to urgently intervene by cancelling the bungled Ward Congresses where they did not hold. Since democracy is a game played exclusively by the electorate, they must not be denied their rights to elect their leaders.
Written by Col. Gora Dauda (rtd).
