We can afford to ignore Galadima, his rebels – Oshiomhole

The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, has revealed that the National Chairman of the newly formed Reformed All Progressives Congress (rAPC) can be ignored by the ruling party, saying that though he is ready to go to any length to talk to people who mean well and who have genuine grievances.

Oshiomhole was speaking at the National Secretariat of the party on Friday in Abuja when a team of the defunct Congress for Progressives Change (CPC) from all the States including the Federal capital Territory (FCT) paid a solidarity visit to him.

He said: “I am very confident that we can afford to ignore Buba Galadima. And like I said yesterday I’m ready to go to any length to talk to people who mean well and who have genuine grievances arising from communication gaps or misunderstanding or even from the error of judgment on the part of anyone or even from the way we have managed our patronage.

“Protests like these are acknowledged and we are working to resolve them. When we see people who have genuine grievances we are not ashamed to talk to them. We recognize that democracy is an equalizer and only people who are humble enough can survive and we have been engaging”.

Oshiomhole further said, “We listened to Buba Galadima. It is as if a very hungry bird is dancing at the centre of the road and a disgruntle drummer not far away in the bush is drumming for him, but this is not to say that we are not aware that there are challenges here and there but anything about APC is considered much more than the sum total of all the challenges we have in many of the states and by the special grace of God, we shall overcome them and we are already overcoming them.

“We have been meeting with various individuals and groups who we believe really have genuine concerns on certain matters and we are making progress but when we see people who don’t mean well, there are a lot of idle people who don’t have any other thing to do and once they don’t have access to national honey pot, then they begin to complain.

“For me, there is no cause for alarm, nobody should panic over one Buba Galadima; whose group, I believe cannot define us in the next election in 2019.

Nigerians are wiser; they know that corruption is fighting back, they also know that President Buhari’s resolve to fight corruption must elicit a counter force and that force must find attraction in some people but like we have rightly said,

we should not be distracted and we encourage the president not to be distracted, he must remain focus and sustain the fight and I believe the rebellion will be crushed using the superior power of argument, persuading our people not to forget in a hurry where we are coming from”.

The group, led by Umar Shuibu, pledged their loyalty and total support to Oshiomhole and President Muhammadu Buhari, saying that the group stand solidly behind him in the fight against corruption which members of the group believe is fighting back.