The National Chairman, Southwest Agenda for Tinubu 2023 Presidential ambition, Senator Dayo Adeyeye, has accused the leadership of the All Progressives Congress in Ekiti State of plotting to tinker with the party’s registers.
Adeyeye, a former Minister of Works, said the party leaders under the leadership of its Chairman, Hon Paul Omotoso, had allegedly evacuated the membership registers across the 177 wards and taken to the Ekiti Government House with the “criminal motive to expunge the names of perceived opposition” members and replace with their preferred aspirant before the January 22, 2022 primary.
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Adeyeye in a statement in Ado Ekiti Saturday and made available to journalists, accused Governor Kayode Fayemi of being the one coercing the state leadership of the party to perpetrate the electoral heist.
Adeyeye, who is angling for the 2022 governorship election, said the party took the unsavoury action over palpable fever surrounding the possibility of President Muhammadu Buhari signing the direct primary law to mandate application of direct primaries by parties.
The former minister called on Governor Mai Mala Buni-led Caretaker Committee and Extra Ordinary Convention Planning Committee to call the State Working Committee to order, saying allowing them to tamper with the party registers will trigger unnecessary crisis in Ekiti APC.
Reacting, the APC State Publicity Secretary, Segun Dipe, described the allegation as “comical, unfounded and spurious,” saying the membership cards issued to bonafide members suffice to authenticate one’s qualification for any primary.
Dipe told Adeyeye that rather than deregistering any SWAGA member, the party was ready to accommodate “even the worst of enemies to shore up its membership base.”
“We are not going to deregister anybody. Senator Adeyeye is a lawyer and he ought to know that the issue of direct primary has not been signed into law by the president. It is premature to start raising this baseless allegation now,” he said.