Governors Ibikunle Amosun, Rochas Okorocha and Abdul’aziz Abubakar Yari have been lambasted by Adams Oshiomhole, National Chairman of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC)…

“At the heart of this challenge is the trauma of going through change. If you know of any addict, such as those who are addicted to alcohol or to drugs, there is what we call ‘withdrawal symptom’ when they cannot see it (drugs) and you try to stop them from that habit they have been addicted to.”

“Now, Nigerians are worried that we can have a democracy in which only a few kingpins dominate the polity and that party membership does not carry any weight. It is the so-called godfathers that anoint. You hear of the anointed.”
“You hear of godfather imposition. Now, my task as national chairman is to strenuously work to steer everything away from this heinous past which the PDP created, so it can be membership driven.”

“Those who have survived so far, courtesy of this kind of impunity, imposition, creating dynasties from their own privileged position to accept the logic of participatory democracy, or bottom-up approach, because nothing explains the frustration of these people, very few people, by the fact that they cannot understand how in a primary, whether direct or indirect, that the vote of a governor is only one and the vote of a sweeper in the governor’s office or alakara (bean cake seller) who is a member of the APC, is also one. ‘They cannot reconcile themselves with this reality.”

So, if you have 200 alakara, 300 sweepers voting for a candidate and you have one governor, two commissioners, five special advisers voting for another, the logic of our own preferred democracy is that this army of sweepers will defeat these powerful governors. So, they are not able to accept this ultimate logic of people-driven, people-based democracy and what I have simply done is to insist that having cautiously chosen change as our slogan, that change must begin with us.”

“It must be reflected in what we do, how we do it and we should learn however frustrating, to reconcile ourselves with the reality that we are in a democracy. Okorocha should provide addresses of 5 million members we’ve lost’ I watched my dear friend, Governor Rochas saying five million members have left.”

“I didn’t know he was such a wonderful statistician. Now, the entire membership of the party in Imo State, as far as I know, are under a million, to put it generously. ‘Where the challenge is coming from is because we have not been able to help him build his political dynasty. “

It will be nice for him to give further details on the origin, the location of those people who have left. ‘’You could see someone on one hand wanting to run down his party and on the other hand, claiming he is loyal to the party. But the truth is that Nigerians have become more and more sophisticated.”