Edo APC Ticket: Leaders Meet As New Pressure Mounts To Pick Oshiomhole’s Man

Stakeholders and leaders of the All Progressives Congress, APC in Edo State are meeting this weekend to consider serious pressures from the presidency to adopt Rep Dennis Idahosa, the choice of Senator Adams Oshiomhole as the party’s running mate to Senator Monday Okpebholo.

The pressure is despite the endorsement of Engr Omoregie Ogbeide-Ihama by all but one of the major leaders of the Edo APC as the running mate last Wednesday. The endorsement was perfected at a stakeholders’ meeting not attended by Oshiomhole in Abuja.

GWG.ng reports that following the failure to push through Idahosa as the party’s running mate the camp of Oshiomhole has lately resorted to a campaign to get him into the ticket as running mate using the highest authorities in the presidency.

The theme of the campaign, it was gathered, was that the presidency should not allow the former governor to be disgraced out of relevance in Edo State with the rejection of his man, Idahosa as running mate.

GWG.ng gathered that Okpebholo had earlier forsworn supplications to pick Idahosa as his running mate after the latter spurned his reconciliation moves and even went to court to challenge his nomination.

The Oshiomhole camp in retort took its campaign to the presidency which is now bending on Okpebholo to consider Idahosa as the running mate.

The candidate has been under pressure and is now said to be at the point of buckling despite the popular choice of Ogbiede-Ihama, a high-level source told GWG.ng

“I can tell you that Ogbiede-Ihama is the best choice as running mate for many reasons, but the Oshiomhole people have been everywhere begging that the former governor is being reduced to irrelevance and that he should not be disgraced out of Edo.”

It was learnt that references have been made to what Oshiomhole did for the president in Edo and out of Edo as national chairman and that he should not be disgraced because of his mistake of not reading the handwriting on the power shift.

However, party leaders are very sceptical of the prospects of Idahosa adding value to the ticket.

One of the issues going to be canvassed at the meeting is that Idahosa comes from Ovia which does not have much votes compared to Oredo where Ogbeide-Ihama comes from.

“You can see that Obaseki has gone to pick Osarodion-Ogie from Ikpboba-Okha which has a big population and it is only Ogbeide-Ihama that could have countered him with his popularity in Oredo,” one party chief mussed on Saturday. That is besides the popular belief that the emergence of Ogbeide-Ihama would turn the PDP as controlled by Governor Godwin Obaseki into an empty shell given the fact that Ogbeide-Ihama is part of the Legacy PDP.

Whatever, the presidency is canvssing the idea of going into the election as a united body and bringing in Oshiomhole’s man is reported to be a major plank for such.

As part of the expected move to gain him favour with the mainstream, Idahosa it was gathered, would at the dawn of day on Monday move to withdraw his court action against Okpbebholo’s emergence as the APC candidate.

Whatever, some of the party leaders in deference to the direct pleas of the presidency have decided to keep mum on the fact that the Okpebholo – Ogbeide-Ihama ticket would have been the best for the party.

“Well, what you see in this kind of thing is that emotion takes over logic and it would seem as if the party is dropping a winning team in order to pay heed to the emotions of Oshiomhole,” the high party official disclosed.

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