Obaseki ’s phantom meetings with President Buhari

First, they said the Governor of Ekiti State, Kayode Fayemi, led Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, hand in hand like an apprentice, to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari to plead for assurances for another term following his outright rejection by the members of the party in the state and the totality of Edo people.

Failing to substantiate this claim with any evidence, especially as more news began to emerge on the difficult paths in front of Obaseki with the APC primary set to hold next month, they moved on to another conjecture, claiming that Progressive Governors Forum met last Wednesday with the President and agreed to hand Obaseki a second term.

But even that had multiple holes: there was no official press release to the effect as is common with the Governors forum after reaching a unanimous decision – and there is also the obvious fact that in a democracy, elections are decided at the polls by the people of the domain within which it is held, not determined in meetings.

More telling of the fact that these phantom meetings took place only in the imagination of the diminished followers of Obaseki is that only recently, after a meeting with the President, the Governor of Sokoto, Aminu Tambuwal, who by the way is of the opposition PDP, had photos of the encounter to show and the Presidency also published same in its tradition of transparency and accountability of the President’s engagements and day-to-day activities in the Aso Rock.

If Obaseki had met the President at any point, there would have been at least a piece of single pictorial evidence. In reality, he is stranded in Abuja, moving from house to house, calling one governor to another, begging, appealing, hoping desperately for a lifeline.

For a man who claims to be fighting ‘godfatherism’, it is astonishing that Obaseki is now pleading for an ‘enthronement’ instead of a clearly defined democratic process based on popular choice.

Welcome back to Benin City, Mr. Godwin Obaseki, the dejected, hopeless and deceitful governor of Edo state.

John Mayaki