PDP behind fake posters of 2023 APC presidential aspirants in circulation -Oshiomhole

The National Chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Adams Oshiomhole was engaged by journalists after a parley meeting with stakeholders of the party in Bayelsa State  to iron out post – governorship primary issues last Thursday .

He condemned comments made by Bayelsa State governor, Seriake Dickson on the coming election in the state, rumours about 2023 presidential race, describing it as uncivil attitude of critics of the Buhari administration. TUNDE OPALANA was there and reports.

**********What is your view of Governor Seriake Dickson’s comments on the APC governorship candidate in Bayelsa State?

Let me use this opportunity to reply directly to my friend, Gov Dickson of Bayelsa. I  think he has allowed his fears, lack of self confidence, his imminent defeat that await him and his party to overcloud his judgement as to resorting in the use of inelegant language and uncounth statement to describe one of his own and a fellow citizen of Bayelsa. When a governor describes one of his own purely on the account of his political differences, using name of terrorists and such things like that, then he has missed it already. And I can understand his fears. If people who go to borrow labels and assume that they are the leaders of the ijaws and that they are the lions, when they see the real and authentic lion, they are sure to be afraid.

So APC rejects and condemn in strong terms the raw language unbecoming of a governor, by a man I otherwise admired, the way he has describe our candidate. We will not come to his own level. On this occasion, we will invoke a popular statement made by Michelle Obama at the peak of the last presidential election in US when she said “when they go low, we fly high”. So when Dickson goes low, we will fly high. We will not join him in using gutter language to describe neither his office nor his person, or even their candidate who is about to be defeated. We recognise he has a right to be selected by his party, we believe our candidate is better than his candidate and we believe he will provide, better, popular-driven, people-oriented governance, not elitist governance for the people of Bayelsa State.

Let me assure him, we will not go low as he has chosen to go, but we will rather go high and higher until he packs out of government house and handover decently like a gentleman to our candidate. By the special grace of God, the next governor of Bayelsa state, David Lyon.

***********There are posters in circulation portraying some APC chieftains, like yourself, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, Nasir El-Rufai as the party’s possible presidential candidate of the party in 2023, how will you react to that?

I want to completely disassociate myself and members of our party from all those posters. We believe that these are the handwork of PDP who think that they can create suspicion within the rank of APC by nominating for our party who they think or purporting or attempting to print for some elements in our party whether to create complete diversion. So, I stand here as National Chairman of APC not only to deny those posters as they affect me, but to deny those posters as they affect any leader of our party, because it is not yet time.  Even people who may have ambition are aware that this is not the time. At this point in time all hands must be on deck to support President Muhammadu Buhari and all our state governors in their respective states to work together unanimously to deliver deliverables for the good of our people in the states and at the federal level.  This is not the time to talk politics

Politics cannot be an all round season, the season for politics is over.  I expect all Nigerians to insist that those elected should go back to work and deliver and justify the mandate they have been given. This is not the time for electioneering. We cannot have electioneering for four years and thereafter you have people elected and continue for another four years. There is time for politicking, there is time for governance, this is the time for governance. All of us in the APC we are committed to backing the President to deliver for the Nigerian people, we will not distract him.

*********There are insinuations that the Presidency is manipulating appointment of some justices of the Supreme Court to the panel of jurists that will adjudicate in the appeal by the PDP and its candidate, Atiku Abubakar against the ruling of the Presidential Election Petition Tribunal to prepare ground for the upholding of the Appeal Court ruling, what is your reaction to that?

Let me also say that, watching the news and reading the papers over the period, we see that the meeting that PDP held in Dubai, part of the decision they took at those meetings was to come back home and begin to throw bag of lies and untruth with a view to creating distraction and even crafting disharmony within the governance of Nigeria.

For example, I was shocked that PDP has abandoned the old age tradition that you do not drag judiciary into the murky waters of politics. I saw PDP and their agent called CUPP, in a press conference claiming that because new judges are about to be appointed that they are just being appointed because of the tribunal dispute.

Now the question is, should the Supreme Court be denied the appointment of all the judges they need, should we say because election matters are in tribunal, Supreme Court judges should not be appointed. And I saw CUPP working for PDP claiming and lecturing us as a people how the Chief Judge of the Federation ought to carry out his duties. They lectured us on who is supposed to be there and who is not supposed to be there. That means they are already in their old traditional way seeking to infiltrate, and to dictate and blackmail the judiciary into a particular form of panel of judges. As far as we are concerned, APC has no business determining for the Chief Justice of the Federation who should be a member of the presidential election tribunal.

We are confident, we have the best collection of legal brains in the country to make the case of our president and our party very clear. You can reduce it to whoppy, PDP petition was simply resting on the handiwork of what we might call yahoo-yahoo boys. When they brought the young man from Kenyan who admitted that he is not certified in any ICT field and that he got his information from a server owned by a so called factsdontlies.com, they do not know the owner of the server , he was in Kenyan when elections were being held only to hack into a system that does not exist.