Oshiomole advised to get rid of Lucifers within APC as he is elected chairman at rancorous convention

FORMER Edo State governor Adams Oshiomole has been advised to resist the blackmail and the stranglehold of the Lucifers within the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) after he was unanimously elected as party chairman yesterday.

At is first national convention since coming into office in 2015, APC delegates elected Governor Oshiomole as their chairman yesterday after all the other candidates withdrew. Governor Oshiomole had been the favourite of President Muhammadu Buhari and the presidency brought its influence to bear on the other contestants, getting them to step down for him.

With elections due in February next year, Governor Oshiomole's main task will be to get the APC into shape as it struggles to regain favour with the public after three years in office. Of late, the government has come under a lot of criticism over its inability to provide security, its perceived lopsided approach to fighting corruption and growing unemployment.

More worrying for the APC is the fact that President Buhari is seen as a narrow ethnic president reluctant to clamp down on Fulani cattle herdsmen who have unleashed terror across the country. An ethnic Fulani himself who also raises cattle, President Buhari has been accused of supporting the campaign by those backing the herdsmen as part of an agenda to expand Fulani territory across Nigeria.

Critics also say that the president is not in control of his government as a narrow cabal of ethnic Fulanis have taken control. Even other Fulanis have criticised President Buhari, saying he appears to have run out of ideas and should have stood down in favour of a younger and more dynamic candidate.

Senator Shehu Sani representing Kaduna Central in the National Assembly, is one of such critics, who has suggested that President Buhari's ill health is also a factor that should have made him stand down. Speaking after the emergence of Governor Oshiomole, Senator Sani, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Local and Foreign Debts, urged the new national executive members of the party not to allow the problems that bedevilled APC over the past three years to persist.

“I believe Comrade Adams can take the party out of the woods and lead it to a new path and a new future. However, I advise that Adams must resist the blackmail and the stranglehold of the Lucifers within the party.

“In the last three years, APC’s broom was stained by the faeces of inequities and glued by the mucus of injustices as it became an unruly ruling party presiding over ruins of its sub chapters. Chief Oyegun is leaving behind an APC that he fashioned and erected on a heap of fraudulent congresses, Cold War and civil war and hatchets buried with leaves," Senator Sani added.

Following a very rancorous convention in which delegates traded punches, all the 18 members of the national executive committee were returned unopposed. Senator Sani urged the next exco to end this kind of acrimony that has made the APC the butt of several jokes from opposition parties.

Senator Sani added: "Chief Oyegun is literally leaving behind grenades covered with flowers of which Comrade Adams must detonate. In the last three years under the outgoing leadership, APC’s broom was unable to clean the political space and even itself.”