The National Publicity Secretary of the Labour Party (LP), Comrade Abayomi Arabambi, on Sunday, said the recent disclosure by the Nobel Laureate, Prof Wole Soyinka, that the party’s candidate in the 2023 presidential election, Mr. Peter Obi, never won the election was nothing but the truth that resonated with Nigerians.
Arabambi, who is of the Lamidi Apapa faction of the LP, said it was condemnable and disturbing that rather than going back to the drawing board to meticulously examine where things had fallen apart and re-strategies for 2027 elections, some members of the Labour Party had chosen to attack the Nobel Laureate, Professor Wole Soyinka, for only re-echoing the truth that was not hidden to discerning Nigerians.
Further expressing support for Soyinka’s position, in a statement, he said the party saw the reaction of its factional Chairman, Julius Abure, through his personal media aide, Mr Obiorah Ifoh, to Soyinka’s statement as nothing but “affront and abuse from a rude boy to his grandfather.”
The publicity secretary said even Prof Charles Soludo, the Governor of Anambra State, where Obi hailed from had also stated in the past that the probability of Obi clinching third position in the presidential race was very slim not to talk of winning the elections.
“As a party, we knew that Professor Wole Soyinka was right in his submission because how does anyone claimed to have won an election based solely on pejoratives, assumption, vague rhetoric and zero evidence pointing to such being the case, but on the expectation that the actual winner would be disqualified and by some stroke of black magic, the candidate in the Third place will suddenly be declared winner without any proof of having scored the majority vote is absolute judicial madness on display by some people.
“We know we lost that election, it was true Obi and Abure wanted to do Gbajue because ab initio, even when the presidential campaign council was formed, in the north, Peter Obi uses Igbo as state coordinators while northerners remain their deputies,” he said.
He, among other things, alluded the failure of the party to refusal to plan, saying it was an open secret that the party in its preparation towards 2023 elections had poor logistics and suffered dearly for it.
Arabambi added: “They did not support any candidate financially, they did not rent party secretariat at the ward, local government and state levels. No campaign material was produced neither was any vehicle purchased for the party at the state level.
“That’s why we failed woefully. Imagine somebody that has no polling unit result sheet, no agents in majority of the polling units now turn around to claim election victory. So, how then do we say we won?”
James Sowolein Abeokuta
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