With prejudice to the outcome of the so-called Ogun East senatorial meeting, where a candidate was said to have emerged as a Senatorial candidate against the 2027 general election, the process through which the “concensus candidate” is said to have emerged is not only an ambush of another contestant for same office at the National Assembly, it is a despicable assault on democracy. Or, how do you shut out a fellow aspirant from a meeting in which he was entitled to be present as a sitting Senator, representing the same Senatorial district at the National Assembly. Going by the image of a former governor of the state, Otunba Gbenga Daniel, now a Senator for Ogun East being denied access to a meeting of his constituency, has further lent credence to the claim in the public domain that APC, as a political party, operate a cult culture in which some who thinks themselves as members are outside of its operational orbit. It happened in Osun, enroute picking the party flag bearer, where we were told that six aspirants- veterans of party elections- were disqualified because they didn’t fill their nomination forms properly. Mischivous as this cult- like exclusion process was, the laughable part of it was that, one of the disqualified aspirants was a former National Secretary of their party who had, at various times in his political odyssey been deputy governor, a Senator, and governorship candidate.
Truth is, whatever may have been the machinations of a party to prevent one of its leading members from picking a party ticket for a contestable office, in which a sitting governor is also interested, it could not have been imagined that such exclusion tactics would include a banditry- like approach, whereby a sitting Senator is detained at the gate of a venue of a meeting in which his presence was crucial for a so- called concensus decision making, even if he was not to be the favoured or preferred candidate for an inter- party election.
But I hope the minds behind such crude process of exclusion, of which a two- term governor of the state, and a sitting Senator, representing the constituency at which meeting he was shut out, are conscious of the fact that their action has consequences, not only for Ogun East Senatorial election, but the governorship aspiration of the party may also suffer collateral damage. You don’t preside over the affairs of a state for eight years without leaving a support base in every part of the state beyond your present section of political operation. Perhaps such crude operational ambush- like tactics, as we witnessed in Osun, and currently in operation in Ogun, may well be the compound gains of opposition parties
