A FORMER governor of Jigawa State and one of the founding fathers of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Alhaji Sule Lamido, has knocked a former governor of Osun State and pioneer national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Chief Bisi Akande, over what he described as unkind, disparaging and discourteous comments on PDP.
Lamido said he could understand and forgive Akande, as his retentive memory may be failing him due to old age, saying elements of dementia will begin to manifest due to the realities of life as we grow very old.
Recall that Akande, speaking on Saturday, January 20, as part of activities marking his 85th birthday anniversary, contended that returning PDP to power would mean a continuation of suffering for Nigerians.
He was reacting to the proposal by the opposition parties to form a coalition and dislodge the ruling APC at the federal level would not offer Nigerians respite from the current hardship.
The PDP presidential candidate in last year’s general elections, Atiku Abubakar, had offered to lead a coalition against APC in the 2027 election.
But Akande, who led a coalition of the opposition parties that dislodged PDP from the centre, said: “If PDP was rejected and the same PDP coalesced again and people say, okay, we will go back to it, the people will go back to their suffering. PDP was defeated because it had no clue.”
However, Lamido, in his verified Facebook page, stated: “I have made every effort to suppress the urge to respond to him, hoping and believing that the NWC of the PDP, or at least its national publicity secretary, will stand up and give Akande an adequate reply in equal measure. But having heard nothing yet from my party, I can no longer suppress the this urge to respond to Akande in my personal capacity.
“Let me state from the onset that I can forgive Akande if his retentive memory is failing him, because all of us at a stage in life, elements of senility or dementia will begin to manifest as the realities of life as we grow very old.
“Now let me take Akande down the memory lane of PDP history from 1999 to early 2014 before the birth of his party, the APC. If you look at all the results of the presidential elections of 1999, 2003, 2007 and 2011, one could see that at each election, the results scored by the PDP were more than that of all the other political parties put together.
“From the above statistics, it is clearly obvious that whatever arrangements put by whatever alliance and by whatever nomenclature named, APC or whatever, the outcome will not change or threaten the dominance of the PDP in any future election, more so that of 2014. Akande must have known this as an indisputable fact, because he was fairly mentally alert at that time.
“So, when the APC alliance or contraption was formed in 2014, anybody with ordinary common sense knew that it was a barren woman who could not conceive unless it is fertilised by special seed. This much is a very undisputed fact.
“The major task then before the desperate barren APC after formation/contraption was how to woe and elope with any seed that could fertilise it. Of course, this period coincided with the then ‘civil war’ in the PDP. In this desperation, the APC took in the PDP seed, which it had all along disparaged, and ‘evilised’ to no end.
“As God will have it, it is this ‘evil’ that gave birth to what catapulted Akande from an obscure local ,little AC/ACN into national limelight. Has he forgotten that my PDP political DNA is now in his blood? While the fore finger he is pointing at what he calls the ‘dirt’ in PDP, his other three fingers are pointing to the PDP dirt in him.
“But like I pointed out earlier, he can be forgiven, and must be forgiven. Senility and dementia are attributes of old age.”
