The reinstated Deputy Governor of Edo State, Philip Shaibu, said that he became more determined to pursue his governorship ambition after the governor of Edo State, Godwin Obaseki threatened to destroy him.
Shaibu said he would have dropped his governorship ambition if Obaseki was reasonable and and spoke to him well.
He noted that he would have allowed the governor to have his way in order to preserve their relationship.
Shaibu maintained that he won the Edo State Peoples Democratic Party’s governorship primary because he had 381 delegates, who would have voted for him if they were not shut out of the Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium in Benin where the exercise took place on February 22.
Shaibu, who has now defected from the PDP to the All Progressives Congress, spoke on Wednesday when he paid a courtesy visit to the APC National Working Committee in Abuja.
He said, “The truth is that the issues were all political. I declared to contest for the governor of Edo State. That is where the fight started.”
“He (Obaseki) said, ‘You cannot contest because I have my plans’. The next thing was that he would destroy me if I continued. For me, no man can destroy the plan of God. As an activist, that day I made up my mind that I was going to contest. As of the time our conversation was on, I was still consulting. I went into the race and I won it because I played high-powered politics. They are not politicians. They rode on our back to where they are. In the politics I played, I actually had 400 out of the 572 delegates.
“A week to the primary, I lost some and had 381. So I brought those 381 on the day of the primary but they were refused accreditation. They took the accreditation tags and gave to their appointees to go and do Aso Ebi reception at the stadium they call primaries. Now, the court has ruled that the delegates I had were the authentic delegates and the ones they brought were fake. So as it is, they have boxed themselves into a corner where I don’t want to go because it is a legal issue.
“We are in court and by the grace of God, I had already been vindicated by two judgments. What is critical is that I want to prove internal democracy must be respected and allowed to play. You can lobby, you can talk to people and people will understand. If the governor had shown leadership, maybe I wouldn’t have contested because I am not a desperate person. My ambition is not inordinate. I have an ambition to fix the state. If somebody else can agree that we collectively fix it, I will follow. But the governor wanted to behave like a military dictator. And for me, we fought.”
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