A socio-political group, the Ondo Movement for Accountability and Good Leadership (OMAGL), on Sunday, faulted the appointment of the Chairman of the Ondo State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Mr Ade Adetimehin, into the party’s Campaign Council for next month’s gubernatorial election in Kogi State.
The group while condemning the inclusion of Adetimehin in the campaign team by the National Working Committee (NWC) of the party further called for his immediate removal from the team on the account of his alleged anti-party activities during the last presidential and National Assembly elections in Ondo state.
OMAGL, in a statement signed by its National Co-ordinator, Abiodun Fanoro, expressed the fear that Adetimehin could undermine APC’s victory in the Kogi November 16, election the way he and some leaders of the party in the state worked for the opposition in the last February/March elections leading to a woeful performance by President Muhammadu Buhari and some other APC candidates.
The group which threw its support behind a similar call by a former deputy governor, Ali Olanusi-led Unity Forum, urged the party’s NWC to without any delay replace Adetimehin with a committed and dedicated APC member from the state.
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“If Mr Adetimehin could betray his own party, the APC, in the last Presidential and National Assembly elections and openly work for the opposition, Action Alliance, in elections that would determine the fate of a President who is from his own party, elections in which his state has a stake in who represents it at the National Assembly, an election in which some of his party candidates were likely to be his relatives or well-known friends, yet he worked against them; what then could he not do in an election that is far away from his state and in which he has little or no direct stake?” the group asked.”
The group also urged the leader of the 56-man Campaign Council, Kaduna state governor Nasir El-Rufai who it described as a “genuine and discipline leader in APC”, to cure the team of any doubt and reject the membership of Adetimehin, noting that the “continued membership of Adetimehin in this distinguished campaign team is no doubt a continuation of APC’s double-dealing of rewarding disloyalties, thereby sending the immoral and wrong message that it pays to be disloyal.
“To stop this negative belief, APC should not only remove Adetimehin from the campaign team, it should remove him as the state chairman and go further to remove from office all those who participated in the anti-party electoral bazaar, but are still holding one political position or the other, so that a clear message would be sent that disloyalties and illegalities do not pay.
“We also wish to add that failure to sanction these people will not help build good morals in the young ones because by this the society is telling them that dishonesty and cutting corners pay and indeed some people are truly untouchable,” the group concluded.
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