Press Statement (Full)
February 17, 2025
You Can’t Return to Office- PDP Tells Sacked Osun State LG Chairmen, Councilors
…Asserts Appeal Court Judgment Sealed Their Fate…Asks IGP to Hold Osun APC Responsible for Violence, Killings
The national leadership of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) @OfficialPDPNig cautions the sacked Osun State Local Government Chairmen and Councilors to perish the thought of forcing themselves back into office as such will amount to a futile venture with dire consequences.
The PDP also charges the All Progressives Congress (APC) to accept the reality and end its resort to self-help, misrepresentations, vituperations, violence and killing with the aim to trigger crisis and destabilize the State, having realized that it has irredeemably lost.
The PDP asserts that the fate of the ousted Local Government Chairmen and Councilors was sealed by the Judgment of the Court to Appeal which nullified the unconstitutional attempt by the then Governor Gboyega Oyetola to illegally plant them as Local Government officers in the guise of an election.
Having been roundly rejected by the people of Osun State in the Saturday, July 16, 2022, governorship election, the then Governor Oyetola and the APC ought to have known that attempting to side-step the laws and manipulate the process to illegally foist APC members and apologists as Local Government Chairmen and Counselors was an exercise in futility which was bound to fail ultimately.
The APC is the architect of its misfortune. It should have known that disregarding and refusing to comply with the provisions of the Constitution and the Osun State Local Government Election Laws with respect to the requirement on notices, processes and procedures of conducting local government election is destined to be fatal and irreparable.
We counsel the Osun State APC to stop playing to the gallery by trying to bring in the exulted office of the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria into disrepute by hopelessly dropping the President’s name at public spaces in their desperate but pathetic and unrealizable attempt to garner undeserved sympathy.
The APC should note that our nation operates a federal system of government with clearly entrenched devolution of powers among the federating units as well as the various sub-national tiers of government. It should therefore desist from the fruitless attempt to drag President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the Federal Government into the issue of local government election which, under the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999 (as amended), is within the purview of the State and has no connection whatsoever with the Federal Government.
If the APC believes that it is truly popular in Osun State as it claims, it should rather get ready for election as already scheduled by the Osun State Independent Electoral Commission (OSSIEC) instead of holding unto an imaginary strand of straw and instigating violence and killings in the State.
Our Party strongly condemns the violence and killing of some youths today by APC thugs and calls on the Inspector General of Police to hold APC leaders in Osun State responsible and bring them to book for this heinous crime.
The PDP calls on the people of Osun State to remain calm, law-abiding and get ready for the Local Government Election as they continue to support Governor Ademola Adeleke in his outstanding delivery of monumental life-enhancing projects and programs in the State.
Signed:
Hon. Debo Ologunagba
National Publicity Secretary
