“You are selfish and can’t speak for Etsako West LGA” – Edo North group replies Akokhia, others

The Edo North Almagam Group (ANAG), a social and political pressure coalition of leaders and members of the All Progressives Congress (APC), has dismissed one Abubakar Akokhia and others as a bunch of selfish men and women, who do not have the interest of Etsako West Local Government Area (LGA) at heart, neither can they speak for or represent the LGA.

Speaking for the frontline political group, which consists of personalities from the six LGAs of the Edo north senatorial district, ANAG’s Coordinator, Prince Akeem Zibiri, chided Akokhia and his group for still playing the politics of “Anywhere Belle Face”(greed and avarice), which he said, had set the people of Etsako West and the north zone backward, which the people had always resented.

The group’s statement was an obvious reference to what it called a clandestine “pseudo meeting held in the Auchi residence of Jim Garuba”, where Akokhia and a few others called on the governorship aspirants of Edo North APC to abandon their 2024 governorship race to support Hon Dennis Idahosa, another aspirant( who has no identifiable source of livelihood before joining politics) from the Edo South senatorial district, who he claimed to be least qualified for the race, but has the snag of abandoning his present seat in the House Reps for a wild goose chase of the governorship seat.

Mr. Zibiri further said that the meeting was attended by no notable APC leaders of the LGA, but by men and women, who were well known for their politics of bitterness, and bread and butter, which had also given Etsako West a bad name.

The statement also accused Abubakar Akokhia and Jim Garuba, who led other speakers at the meeting of “political buying and selling” engagement, similar to the very one where “Mr. Oshewo and his backward-integrated persons of Etsako West”, once thought that selling Senator Adams Oshiomhole, was going to permanently satisfy their greedy desires and make them politically relevant, than the way they have become paupers and political irrelevants, after selling the former APC national chairman for butter and bread to Governor Godwin Obaseki and his deputy”

Mr. Zibiri, a notable leader of APC of the LGA and the north district, recalled that the same Akokhia and Garuba were in a “spoilers group” that had always worked against the governorship bids of Edo northerners, as they did to the Oshiomhole’s ambition in 2007, only for him to win the governorship, and both men turned around to benefit from that administration.

While he also condemned Akokhia and Garuba for bringing the good name and exalted position of Senator Oshiomhole into their “419 game”, Mr. Zibiri challenged the two men to come out with a single petition, if to justify the lies which they told that President Bola Tinubu had received many petitions that Edo north zone must not contest in the 2024 governorship run, because a minister had come from the same zone.

The statement categorically called on all the APC governorship aspirants, Edo APC and the public not to take Akokhia and Garuba and their “cut and nail group” seriously, as it is only the competency and good antecedents” of the aspirant and non-recognition of zoning that would inform the voice of APC’s candidate for the contest.