Former Edo State governor, Senator Adams Oshiomhole, has criticized incumbent Governor Godwin Obaseki, labeling his tenure as a failure and asserting that there is nothing in Obaseki’s eight years in office to justify support for the candidate he endorsed in the just concluded gubernatorial election.
In an interview with ARISE NEWS on Sunday, Oshiomhole expressed skepticism regarding Obaseki’s influence on the electorate, stating that the governor had effectively “burned his bridges” with those who once supported him.
This breakdown in relationships, he claimed, has left Obaseki as a “lonely man” in politics, isolated from the very constituents he needs to rally behind his chosen successor.
The Senator said, “God knows that Obaseki misgoverned the state, he defrauded the people, he jailed innocent women, he did a lot of terrible things that any man who has the fear of God will not do to his own people, and he’s proud to say ‘I will crush, I will crush’. Every other minute, he will say ‘I am the Chief Security Officer.’ In the process, he forgot that these powers belong to the people, the sovereignty belongs to the people. They delegate you, they entrust you, believing that you will do good to them.
“Instead, you used the power to threaten, you made promises you never kept, so there was nothing. And even the royal father, he was fighting him. He fought everybody, whether you looked for his trouble, didn’t look for his trouble, for Obaseki, crushing people was [for] himself a way of life. So, we are very happy now that we have consigned him to the dustbin of political history.
“As a person, he is my friend, but as governor, he was a failure,” he added.
Oshiomhole went on to say, “That we defeated Obaseki and Asue Ighodalo should be quite predictable. There was nothing either in Obaseki performance nor Asue’s credentials that would have made them win the elections, and I said that before to this channel that Asue is not electable. Now what are the facts? Obaseki is like the proverbial blind man who in 2016, he rode on my back as an outgoing governor, we crossed the river, and he didn’t allow his leg to touch the water, and so, he didn’t understand what it took to become a governor.
“In 2020, again, there were internal crisis in the APC, Obaseki again had the backing of some elements within the APC, and of course, the very Wike that he’s demonising now, Governor Wike, as he then was, left Port-Harcourt to Benin, and the REC they were protesting against, that same REC was in Benin. Again, Obaseki rode on the back of Wike and elements and what became known as PDP Legacy Group, together with some of the elements in APC. They took him to cross the river for the second time without his leg touching water. And so, twice, he was being described as the iron man.
“And so this time around, he has burned all the cables, he has divided the PDP into two, the legacy PDP left him, Wike left him, I left him, his deputy left him, and so he was now a lonely man. And now, he had to cross the river using his own strength, he just found that in the process he got stuck inside the river, which he himself predicted that once he loses the election, he said the election was a do or die. Now Edo people have done it, and he is dead.”