Our defeat in Anambra election surprising —Oyegun

National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) Chief John Odigie-Oyegun, has expressed regret that his party lost last November governorship election to the All Progressives Grand Alliance, (APGA) standard bearer, Willie Obiano. The APC candidate, Tony Nwoye, came second in the election while the PDP candidate, Oseloka Obaze came, a distant third.

Inaugurating a committee led by former Ekiti state governor, Niyi Adebayo, to unravel why the APC lost the election, Chief Oyegun said it
was imperative that his party addressed reasons that led to its defeat in Anambra ahead of the forthcoming general elections.

He further disclosed that it was distressing that the party lost the election despite the enormous commitment deployed to ensure its
victory, while equally restating his resolve to ensure that the ruling party makes a remarkable presence in the south-east and south-south
geo-political zones.

“The South East and the South-South will be crucial and critical to our victory in 2019. Not from the point of view of numbers of votes because we are fairly confident that having gone through our initial planning that the APC would carry the day in 2019.

“But for us, it is critical that the South East and South South zones have contributed immensely to the survival of this nation and so, must
fully be represented in what is going to be a truly national government of the APC in 2019.

“Today, we are inaugurating a strategic committee and the mandate is for you, Chief Niyi Adebayo and your team to do a forensic examination of what could have gone wrong; why did we not do as well as we expected; what were the factors that contributed to our low score.

“We did much better compare to 2015, no question about that; but in all fairness, given the work, we put in and given the reactions of the public and the rest of it there was no question at all that we ought to have done a lot better. So, the question today is why. It is
important that we are using Anambra as a trigger.

“The terms of reference were drafted and appropriately worded to give you the scope to look at the possibilities of God forbid a repetition of what happened in Anambra in other states in the South East. We want to start early; we want to strategise early; we want to plan early; we want to be confident that after we have done our fieldwork and the reward from the field work is commensurate with the efforts that we have put in.

“I want to be partisan here, we want a situation where we will win handsomely in the South East. For the South-south, the circumstances
are slightly different. But we are going to have the same type of strategic team for the South-south.

“The issues are different, the environment is different, the circumstances are different, but it is necessary also that we build
the South-south into the national power framework that we expect to emerge in 2019. So, l want to thank you, gentlemen, for accepting this onerous assignment.”

Responding, Chairman of the committee, Niyi Adebayo assured the party that his Committee would meet all the stakeholders in Anambra, with a view to doing a thorough post-mortem on what actually led to the loss and proffer solutions.

“We intend to get reaching submission, we will hold public sittings with the party members. We will visit key Anambrians, with a view to
getting the views and getting responses to questions they are asking us and get to the root of the matter and find out what exactly the
problem is all about and hopefully, find solutions to avoid its occurrence in future.

‘’Like I said earlier, we didn’t do well, we didn’t win but we did better than we did before. Obviously, there is something we are doing
right because it’s just that we did better than before but we believe that we did not do as well as we should have done and we want to find out reasons why and once we know those reasons, we will be able to apply those reasons to South East to enable us to get much better results than we did in 2015.’’