Ekiti 2018: Afuye slams fellow contenders for rejecting Oluyede, backs IDF over APC consensus candidate

Former Majority Leader of the Ekiti State House of Assembly, Hon.Funminiyi Afuye has thrown his weight behind the choice of Dr Wole Oluyede as the All Progressives Congress (APC) preferred candidate from Ikere-Ekiti.

Afuye condemned the opposition of two aspirants, Mr Muyiwa Olumilua and Mr Kola Alabi to the choice of Oluyede saying it was wrong for the duo to have agreed to the process at a private parley and come out to condemn it in the open.

He also hailed the role played by Ikere Development Forum (IDF) led by an eminent lawyer, Chief Wole Olanipekun (SAN), in narrowing down Ikere’s APC aspirants to one arguing that the process was democratic and not an imposition.

The five APC aspirants who participated in the process were Oluyede, Afuye, Olumilua, Alabi and Chief Sesan Fatoba.

Olumilua, son of a former governor, and Alabi have vowed to go ahead with their ambition and declared their readiness to participate in the state APC primary election.

Olanipekun and other IDF members, in a bid to enhance Ikere’s chances of producing the next governor called five APC aspirants from the town together at a meeting held in Lagos from February 11 to 12 and urged them to pick someone among themselves.

When the aspirants could not agree among themselves who should be the town’s APC consensus candidate, they all agreed that the group should choose one of them and Oluyede, a medical practitioner and investor, emerged as the choice.

Addressing a press conference at his Ikere-Ekiti residence on Saturday, Afuye, who is also former Ekiti State Commissioner for Information, advised fellow kinsmen aggrieved with the choice of Oluyede to sheathe their swords.

He argued that putting up a candidate among them would enhance their community’s chances of clinching the ticket and help Ekiti South’s quest to win the governorship seat for the first time since the state was created.

Afuye said: “Anyone of us (the five aspirants) who agreed to the conditions, openly and freely given to us by the Ikere Development Forum and later came out to say contrary does not deserve to be governor.

“There was no dissent at the meeting and all the five aspirants conceded to the outcome before changing. They must know that IDF was only showing concerns, members are not politicians.

“The five of us conceded to the idea that the IDF should use its discretion for the shadow and we had an agreement that the outcome will be binding.

“It wasn’t Oluyede alone that has benefited from this, some people had benefited from such gesture in the past.

“All of us, I mean the five aspirants from Ikere can’t go into the APC primary and get a good result, the outcome will be disastrous for us.

“If there was anyone to be aggrieved with the exercise, I should be the one being the most experienced among them. But politics is about sacrifice and protection of interest.

“It will be our interest for the governor to be domiciled in Ikere in 2018 and that is what we want to protect, so I plead with my other brothers to accept the outcome honourably.”

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