Our Party Failed Gov. Ademola Adeleke – PDP

Governor Ademola Adeleke

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has admitted that internal leadership failures, instead of external political pressure, led to the defection of former Osun governorship aspirant, Ademola Adeleke, to the Accord Party. The PDP National Publicity Secretary, Ini Ememobong, recently had his say while speaking on Channels Television’s The Morning Brief.

According to him, the party failed to address the issues that ultimately drove Adeleke away, and misplaced optimism definitely exacerbated tensions surrounding Adeleke’s situation.

He added that Adeleke’s situation and that of Rivers State Governor, Siminalayi Fubara, are very much unrelated.

His words, “Adeleke is a victim of circumstance, and those circumstances were created by human failings within the party. Every problem has a human cause and therefore should also have a human solution, but decisive action was not taken early enough. If leadership had acted firmly from 2023 when the decline began, the outcome might have been different.

Sometimes leaders believe that once passions cool, people will reconsider their positions. But that didn’t happen here, and by the time the convention took decisive action in Ibadan, things had already gone too far. That is how he became a victim of vicarious liabilities that he could not completely detach himself from.

We are not making excuses for anyone. Both situations are circumstantial, and even the victims had roles they played in the conflicts that engulfed them. But in the case of Fubara, he voluntarily became the party’s candidate, and those who supported him have repeatedly spoken about the agreements made. Till today he hasn’t told anyone what the agreement was.

We sympathise deeply with Governor Fubara, because he is a calm and gentle person pushed to the wall. But we frown at the attempt to shift blame after he personally told Nigerians it was a ‘father–son matter’. This is classic Stockholm syndrome, where the captive falls in love with the captor, and it leads to conscious amnesia about where the real blame should be placed.

When fighting for a person, the person must feel you are fighting for him. But throughout that period, the governor discouraged people from fighting, insisting he would ‘resolve it’. You cannot cry more than the bereaved. No one can administer an injection to a patient who insists the injection will kill him.

A political party is the hotbed of conflict because it is a potpourri of heterogeneous struggles for power. To say the PDP has failed would mean there was an examination set and a score given, and that’s not the case. Even the ruling party faces its own internal battles despite having a President.

We are not begging anyone, but we are reaching out. The Turaki-led administration is reaching out, and the Governors’ Forum is reaching out. Every executive has the legal capacity to make decisions, even if some of those decisions may be moral or immoral, but still legal.”

WOW.