Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole
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Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole on Tuesday said despite being a member of the Action Congress of Nigeria, the late President Umar Yar’Adua contributed financially to his governorship campaign.
Oshiomhole also claimed Yar’Adua supported him financially during his battle to reclaim his mandate from Oserheimen Osunbor, who was declared the winner of the 2007 Edo State governorship election.
The governor made the submissions at the public presentation of a book Politics, Power and Death written by a former spokesman for the late President, Mr. Olusegun Adeniyi.
Describing Yar’Adua as one of the nation’s finest leaders, he regretted that his ill-health and eventual death denied the nation of his services.
He said, “I believe Yar’Adua was one of the few statesmen that have had the opportunity to preside over Nigeria. You can be President and not be a statesman.
“I say this because often time, when people benefit from a process, they celebrate the process regardless of the impurities everybody else can see and all those who have reservations are dismissed as miscreants, people who are grumbling because they lack access and so on.
“To my recollection Yar’Adua is the only President who passed through a process and had the guts to face the Nigerian people and say ‘this process that produced me could have been a lot better.”
Oshiomhole recalled that Yar’Adua told him that he and average Nigerians were aware that he (Oshiomhole) won the election.
He said, “Yar’Adua knew I was not in the PDP. He called me and said ‘Adams, your own candidature for governorship is not a party matter, I recognised that under the law there is no such thing as independent candidate if not even, if you contest election in Katsina, you have enough followers there. So I am going to give you support’ and he gave me generous financial support for my campaign.
“If you don’t like this disclosure, you can withdraw his membership of the PDP if he himself had not already withdrawn it.
“And when I lost, he encouraged me to fight on. He again gave me support to contribute to my legal case in court. Now I see that by those qualities that he was looking at people not for their party affiliation but for who they are and he was ready to quietly offer his support.
“When the godfathers moved to blocked me from going to the Villa after I had defeated them in the election, the late Yar’Adua invited me and said ‘don’t worry about the godfather,’ he doesn’t know who you are. He cannot determine your access to me, you are a governor of a state. Every governor regardless of his political party, shares with me the burden, the challenge and the privilege of keeping Nigeria going. And so you will always have access to me’.”
Adeniyi said he had no regrets working for Yar’Adua whom he described as a good man despite his health challenges.
He recalled that the only reason why governors opposed the move by former Ebonyi State Governor Sam Egwu from becoming the PDP chairman was because of his closeness to former President Olusegun Obasanjo.
The author said the late president himself recognised the fact that Egwu was the best man for the job at that time and that informed his appointment as a minister.
He said he left the Presidential Villa at the lowest moment of his life when many things he did not say were attributed to him.
Egwu, who was the Minister of Education during the Yar’Adua administration, said some members of the Federal Executive Council played the roles they played during the problems created by Yar’Adua’s protracted illness and absence because they were consistently misled by those closed to the late President.
“Those close to him kept telling us he would resume tomorrow and so we were left at their mercy,” he added.
A former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Alhaji Ahmed Yayale, also said some members of the cabal in the villa were also bent at eliminating him during the trying period but he managed to survive by the mercy of God.
Ekiti State Governor Kayode Fayemi observed that Nigerians disposition to the ill-health of the late president was as a result of the mismanagement of information of his health status.
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