The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has defended Oyo State governor, Seyi Makinde, over the ‘wetie’ comment, at the national summit of opposition political parties at Ibadan on Saturday, and said it was not a call for violence.
PDP, in a statement issued by the National Publicity Secretary, Kabiru Tanimu Turaki-led faction, Ini Emembong, said the speech is a caution and advisory to the All Progressives Congress (APC) led Federal Government, and other national institutions, of the crisis that their actions and inactions could result in.
The statement reads, “Only a guilty aggressor can interpret it to mean a threat or call to violence.
“It is common knowledge that those who do not learn from history are doomed by it,” the party further warned, adding that Governor Makinde offered a reminder that when insatiable political greed and avarice replace patriotism and good governance, they are compounded by the accumulated anger and frustrations of the citizenry.
PDP stated that the events that led to the sad incident of ‘wetie’ and the current happenings within the political space, as orchestrated by the APC, are not just similar but identical in both intent and execution.
“To continue doing the same thing while expecting a different result is the very definition of political recklessness,” the party said.
It warned that when pushed to the wall, people would react, stating that the current slide into elected totalitarianism was engineered by the APC and the Federal Government.
“They cannot decry the effect while remaining willfully blind to the cause and to their own culpability in it,” PDP stated, and recalled that when the APC was in opposition, it not only threatened violence, but openly promised to make the country ungovernable, “with the infamous baboon and blood
narrative.
“They therefore lack any moral capacity to complain about a mere historical recollection by a sitting governor.”
The party warned that as long as the targeted state-sponsored decimation of the opposition continues, the opposition parties will explore potent strategies, within the ambit of the law, to prevent the enthronement of a one-party state under an elected dictator.
PDP said APC should be ashamed of its failure in both governance and politics, and the resort to the crude tactics of inducement, intimidation and persecution of opposition leaders.
