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The people of Taraba State and indeed, Nigerians who still remember the attempts by Hajiya Aisha Alhassan and her godfathers in the nation’s entrenched political oligarchy to use the judiciary to rob Governor Darius Dickson Ishaku of his hard-earned but well deserved victory in the 2015 Governorship election in the state are shocked beyond imagination by the recent flippant, emotive and false comments by Adams Oshiomhole, the new National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress, APC, on that historic episode.
Oshiomhole had, during a visit by Hajiya Alhassan to his new office on June 27, 2018, made false and highly contemptuous claims that His Excellency, Governor Darius Dickson Ishaku’s celebrated victory in that election was a product of electoral manipulations. What a tragic and callous attempt to turn the truth on its head?
Mr. Oshiomhole did not just stop at these false and provocative comments. He added what was obviously a 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.
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 favor 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.
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 who 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 people of Taraba State are today much more determined than ever to vote for Governor Darius Dickson Ishaku and will do so more massively in 2019 than they did in 2015. His achievements in his first tenure have endeared him to the electorate in Taraba State as the Messiah the people need and deserve to have. They have 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.
Oshiomhole’s arrogant determination to use state power now in the hands of APC to rig the 2019 elections will fail, by the Grace of God.
Bala Dan Abu – Senior Special Assistant to the Governor on Media and Publicity.
