PDP chieftain warns against external influence in crisis

A chieftain of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Niran Sule-Akinsuyi, has warned against allowing external influence to increase the crisis rocking the party’s leadership.

Sule-Akinsuyi, who spoke to The Guardian in Akure yesterday, said: “The attempt to externalise a crisis that is obviously an internal problem may not be successful. The reason is that those who are directly affected in it are a small percentage of the state’s population.”

The party chieftain said the failure of the party’s leaders to obey its rules was the major cause of the current division.

He said, “The population of Ondo State is about three million and the politicians are only a small percentage of that population. This is an in-house problem among politicians of the two factions, which does not involve the generality of the people.”

Sule-Akinsuyi, who contested in the party’s primary, criticised Governor Olusegun Mimiko for “portraying the crisis as affecting the majority of our people.”

He said it was wrong for the governor to create the impression that the state would be engulfed in crisis because the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) substituted one candidate for another.

He condemned Ekiti State Governor, Ayo Fayose and the Publicity Secretary of the Ahmed Makarfi-led faction, Dayo Adeyeye, for warning against a repeat of the 1983 electoral violence in the state if the polls are rigged.

According to him: “Why would anybody want to remind us of the pains of 1983 and try to incite our people to violence? This is clearly unacceptable and ungodly. All right-thinking citizens of Ondo should reject this selfish call to violence.

“Equally condemnable is the ongoing attempt to drive a wedge into the ethnic fabric that holds us together as a people. Some politicians are inciting the people of Akure against other sections of the state because of the lucre of political power.”

He said the law should be allowed to take its full course in the matter between Eyitayo Jegede and Jimoh Ibrahim, who had been listed at different times by the INEC as the PDP’s candidates.

He added: “The governor is a product of judicial intervention in the democratic process and should not destroy the fountain that he had drunk from.”