The governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the Edo State, Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu, has dismissed the allegations made against him by the former National Chairman of the party, Mr. Adams Oshiomhole, when he (Ize-Iyamu) was the candidate of the PDP in 2016, saying the former governor did not mean the negative things he said about him.
Ize-Iyamu claimed that the APC chieftain was only trying to “de-market” him when he contested for governor on the platform of a different party — the PDP – then.
In 2016 when he was campaigning for Godwin Obaseki, the APC candidate who has now defected to the PDP, Oshiomhole denounced Ize-Iyamu as someone who cannot be trusted with public funds.
He said the then PDP candidate was hiding from the anti-graft agencies.
But Ize-Iyamu said Oshiomhole was “playing politics” and the things he said about him was not from his heart.
“He made those statements during the period I was on the other side and was contesting to be the State governor and he (Oshiomhole) was determined to stop me. What do you expect? Were you expecting him to praise me at that time when he did not want me to be governor?” he asked.
“So, when you look at the context in which he said those things, you will understand that he was just playing politics and he needed to de-market me so that his candidate would have an advantage. After the election, that was the end of it. So, I do not think we should dwell too much on what he said before the election.
“If you are saying that, we can also take you back to what he said about me before then. People are saying look at the bad things he said during the campaign. Why did they not look at the good things he said before the campaign?
“The truth is that he was only trying to de-market me so that Edo people would not vote for me, not that it was from his heart. Of course, the man (Oshiomhole) can speak for himself; he is not dead. We are all pretending not to know that in politics, you can say all kinds of things just to de-market your opponent.”
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