The Labour Party in Osun State has advised the ruling All Progressives Congress in the state to pick the younger brother of the late Senator Isiaka Adeleke as the party’s standard bearer in the July 8, 2017 bye-election for the vacant seat of the Osun West Senatorial District.
Incumbent Senator Adeleke, who represented the district in the National Assembly, died on April 23, 2017, at a hospital in Osogbo as a result of alleged drug overdose.
But a former candidate of the LP in the 2014 Osun West Senatorial District election, Mrs. Romoke Edu-Ogunlana, said giving the APC ticket for the forthcoming bye-election in the district to Adeleke’s younger brother, Ademola Adeleke, would be the greatest honour the party and the people of the area would have done to the memory of the late lawmaker.
She argued that it would be unfair for the APC not to compensate the late Senator Adeleke’s family with the bye-election ticket.
“We will be happy if the APC can give Mr. Ademola Adeleke, the younger brother to late Senator Adeleke, or any other relation of his, the party’s ticket for the Osun West Senatorial District bye election. Doing this will be in honour of our late senator and we promise to support the party in this regard,” Edu-Ogunlana said.
She, however, warned that if the APC failed to allow Adeleke’s younger brother or any other member of his family to contest in the bye-election to replace him in the Senate, the LP would be left with no other option than to withdraw its support for the ruling party and present its own candidate for that poll.
The LP chieftain, who spoke in an interview in Osogbo, the state capital, recalled that the late Senator Adeleke, who was also the first civilian governor of the state, treated everyone in his constituency equally inspite of the differences in political affiliation.
While assuring that either Ademola or any other member of the Adeleke family presented by the APC would get the support of the people of the senatorial district, the female politician argued that opposition to the choice candidate of the people would fail in the bye-election.
On why the LP had decided to interfere in the decisions by the ruling APC, Edu-Ogunlana said, “We are interested in the growth of APC, our constituency and the state at large. That is the beauty of democracy. If a party is doing well, there is nothing bad if the opposition acknowledges it just as we can’t ignore the party when they are doing wrong things. I want to let the APC know that if there is no assistance of the Labour Party, they will not emerge victorious in the bye-election.
“The Labour Party is not the APC and other parties that share N5000 to voters. If they (APC) fail to present any relation of Senator Adeleke, we (LP) will produce our own candidate.”
