A chieftain of the All Progressives Congress, APC, in Lagos State, Biodun Ajiboye, has claimed that the Indigenous of Biafra, IPOB, helped the presidential candidate of the Labour Party, Peter Obi to win the February 25 election in the state.
He said that the IPOB is one major reason the Labour Party must not be allowed to lead Lagos State, since, according to him, the leader of the party, Peter Obi, never spoke against the secessionist movement.
He also accused the former Anambra State governor of riding on the back of religious and tribal factors to defeat the APC in the last presidential election.
Ajiboye admitted that the LP and the Obidient Movement took the APC unaware and shook their political foundation in the presidential election, vowing that they will never allow that to repeat in the March 18 governorship and states assembly elections.
Speaking on factors that affected the APC in the last election, the party chieftain also pointed to the EndSARS protest, adding that the youths are still harbouring the incidents of the national protest.
“Obi actually rode on the religious factor. He wanted to ride on it to power. So he was hopping from church to church telling them ‘take your country back, take your country back’ as if the country literally belongs to the Christians and somebody took it from them. Wrong politicking if I may say,” he said on Arise TV.
“So the Christians started to feel they must vote out Muslims and must not allow Muslim-Muslim tickets to win. That was what worked against Lagos State. Some churches particularly came very hard on their members telling them not to vote for X or Y, so that worked against us.
“And the tribal factor. Obi played tribal politics and that again worked against us because the Igbo community came together in one bloc and gave their votes to Obi. We were caught unaware to a large extent. It was an insurgency upon our political stability and fortress.
“They actually came without us expecting it and now that they’ve done it we’re now very much awake. We now know where and what to do to ensure that a repeat of such calamity does not happen. Why do I call it a calamity? People do not understand the enormity of what it would be for the Labour Party to win Lagos State.
“There’s a secessionist group called IPOB which the Federal Government of Nigeria has prohibited but they are still operating very actively in the East and there was never a time Peter Obi spoke against IPOB. And the kind of electoral fortunes Peter Obi recorded in the East is an indication that IPOB worked for him.”
