By Ishaya Ibrahim
The government of Taraba State has accused the newly elected national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Adams Oshiomhole, of making false and contemptuous claim over the outcome of the 2015 governorship election of the state.
Oshionhole had, during a visit by Hajiya Aisha Alhassan, the APC flagbearer in the 2015 governorship election in Taraba State to his new office, said that Governor Darius Ishaku’s victory in that election was a product of electoral manipulations.
But in a statement by Senior Special Assistant to the Governor of Taraba State on Media and Publicity, Bala Dan Abu, he said that the facts prove Oshiomhole wrong.
“For now, Oshiomhole only needs to be reminded that the 2015 electoral victory of Arc. Darius Dickson Ishaku is, to date, the most scrutinized victory in the entire history of elections in Nigeria. It was a tortuous and agonizing exercise which spent clearly two years in the various arms of the Nigerian judiciary and in all but one stage of that process, the declarations were in favour of Governor Ishaku. And this includes the Supreme Court whose pronouncements sealed the hopes of the real electoral manipulators who, counting on the support and collaboration of their agents in the Judiciary, thought they could rob him of his victory,” he said.
Abu said Oshionmhole has a history of making emotional outbursts.
“It is sad and unfortunate that Oshiomhole has come into his new office of National Chairman of APC with his notorious character of unguarded outbursts and insensitivity to people’s feelings which saw him shouting at a widow eking a living by selling a handful of goods on a street in Benin City during his tenure as Governor ‘to go and die.’ His inhumanity against the suffering people which he has carried into the APC’s apex chair of leadership and the abysmal failure of the party’s elected leaders at all levels of governance in the country are the reasons his party will be rejected in Taraba State and in Nigeria come 2019,” the statement reads.
He said Oshiomhole did not only stop at making false and provocative comments about the election, but also added an obvious threat to free and fair elections in Taraba State.
“He said the instruments of electoral manipulation in the state had shifted base and is now in the hands of the APC. What he is suggesting, therefore, is that the APC is determined to use INEC and other instrumentalities of Federal power to rig the 2019 elections in Taraba State. The answer that Oshiomhole and his agents of electoral manipulations deserve from Tarabans on that issue is yet in the womb of time and will be delivered when the time is ripe,” Abu said.
He said that the people of Taraba State are today much more determined than ever to vote for Governor Ishaku and would do so more massively in 2019 than they did in 2015 because his achievements in his first tenure have endeared him to the electorate in Taraba as the Messiah the people need and deserve to have.
“They have got him, he has stood by them and they will stand by him at all times, even with the so-called instruments of electoral manipulations in the hands of Oshionmole’s APC,” Abu said.
