Adeleke Won Fair And Square, ‘No Alliance With Aregbesola’  – PDP

A former Deputy National Publicity Secretary of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Diran Odeyemi says the Minister of Interior, Rauf Aregbesola did not help the opposition party to win the July 16th, 2022 Osun governorship election.

According to Odeyemi, the PDP had no alliance with any political party or a faction of the All Progressives Congress (APC) as speculated in the public space.

Speaking with Vanguard on the post-mortem of the just-concluded Osun governorship election, Odeyemi said; “Maybe the reason why they thought Aregbesola helped us was because some of his commissioners decamped to our party, just like we sold liability to them and bought assets from APC so it was on both camps, there was no time the party met with the minister or anybody to say come and help us win the election. We knew we were going to win,” he said.

He said PDP won the election on free and fairground, describing the victory as revenge by the people of Osun State against what APC did to PDP in 2018.

“This is like a set of armed robbers, who rob you some of your properties, while they were sharing the goods one felt cheated and left the group and came back to tell us, yes we actually robbed you of your victory but this time around, we apologize, we are not going to participate”, Odeyemi said.

“That was exactly what happened not that Aregbesola directly worked with us. They’ve been having their own internal crises just like we have our own, too. There were lots of our members, a former Deputy Governor for that matter, a former senatorial Chairman for that matter, who decamped to APC.

“We didn’t cry because of that. What we did was restrategize. Here’s a Deputy Governorship candidate who could only win us 3,000 in the entire Ile-Ife and we reviewed the whole thing and said this man is not popular in Ile-Ife that we had to change him and because of that he decided to decamp and we told them what you are buying or the person that decamped to you is a liability. We will go to your camp and get assets and we got assets from them,” he added.

On what made the PDP so confident of victory, Odeyemi said, “If you have prepared very well for an exam you will be sure within yourself that you are going to pass that exam, let them bring any questions. That is exactly our case. We are sure of our strategy, the way we campaigned.” – Vanguard report