Former Osun State Governor, Olagunsoye Oyinlola has said that President Muhammadu Buhari’s alleged underperformance has made him regret quitting the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 2013.
Oyinlola, who was National Secretary of PDP, joined the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), one of the parties that formed the All Progressives Congress (APC) which produced Buhari in 2015.
He explained that he quit PDP after falling out with then National Chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, who had the backing of then incumbent President Goodluck Jonathan.
The ex-PDP scribe noted that the five governors that quit the party at the time did so to protest his shabby and unjust treatment by the party.
Oyinlola said that though Tukur managed to convince Jonathan that the governors had no electoral value, their ouster led to the president’s loss in 2015.
He told Vanguard, “And the greatest blow which I know hit President Jonathan was the manner in which we moved. Although it was seven governors that planned the movement, two of them, Jigawa and Niger, backed out at the last minute.
“But before the two backed out, the seven states with the governors and all the delegates, in the course of the national convention, walked out and went to the Yar’Adua Centre where we formally declared the NewPDP. And that NewPDP, too, was a way of saying, ‘We have grievances. Let us talk’. The intention was not to go. But they called our bluff.
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“And today, the whole thing is history. If you take the votes that President Buhari had from those states out of what he had, Jonathan would have won the election. That is why I said it was because of me.
“Looking at what was done to me by the (defunct) ACN, there ought not to have been any relationship with them. with the decision of the seven governors anchored on the unjust removal of Oyinlola as the national secretary, I had no alternative. They were fighting my cause; wherever they said they were going, I would go.
“Some of my people asked me, ‘You are going to the ACN despite what they did to you?’ I said, ‘It is not my decision; it is the decision of the group and I have no alternative but to follow them’. And that is why I said it was all because of me.”
However, he said Buhari’s poor performance has made him regret joining APC.
Oyinlola said, “There is a regret in the sense that we thought we had the worst of government in Jonathan but what we went to, honestly, was so incomparable. It made Jonathan a saint. And that is the only regret I had.
“Giving the antecedent of President Buhari, being a retired General, and a flash of his action as a military head of state, we had believed that he would straighten things security wise, economically, and infrastructure wise.
“Now, mention an area of development that he has been able to tackle boldly, taking an inference from what he did as military head of state. He is a shadow of what we used to know.”